The Enemy At Home (22 page)

It may seem odd, given the state of the American family, that a group of Americans would seek to attack and transform the domestic institutions of other cultures where the family remains intact, most children grow up with two parents and a host of relatives, and where divorce rates remain extremely low. Yet for the past three decades, the cultural left has been conducting a global campaign to impose liberal family values on non-Western cultures. Nicholas Kristof expresses the rationale for this enterprise: “The central moral challenge we will face in this century is to address gender equality in the developing world.” The problem, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris confess, is that most of the world subscribes to traditional values. Therefore, “Cultural change is a necessary condition for gender equality.” Feminist Ellen Willis calls for a “serious long-range strategy” to combat what she calls “authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture, and morality…all over the world, including the Islamic world.”
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Consequently the family has become ground zero in the global culture war.

The campaign to undermine traditional values worldwide is spearheaded by feminist groups like the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, population control groups like Planned Parenthood International, homosexual rights groups like InterPride, philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation, and human rights groups like Amnesty International. Most Americans, who are well aware of the spread of American popular culture abroad, know very little about this campaign. Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives one third of its funds from the U.S. government, has clinics all over the world that distribute condoms to young people and provide abortions to teenage girls without their parents’ permission or knowledge. When homosexuals are arrested in Muslim countries for conduct that violates the law of those countries, groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch demand their immediate release and sometimes pay for their legal defense. Feminist groups provide funding and legal support to indigenous activists seeking to pressure non-Western courts and governments to make divorce as easy to obtain as it is in the West.

With the help of ideologues like Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland who served as U.N. high commissioner for human rights, the left works through international agencies to pass resolutions undermining the traditional family. This campaign has been going on since 1979, when the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) first defined women’s rights in opposition to the family and proposed abortion as a “reproductive right” protected by international law. These rights were affirmed and extended at the 1994 Cairo conference on population, the 1995 Beijing conference on women, and the 2002 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Armed with the proceedings of these international meetings, the left proclaims a whole set of newly enacted rights and then browbeats non-Western governments to change their laws or be declared in violation of international norms and treaties. For the cultural left, “international law” provides a mechanism to penetrate the otherwise-opaque barrier of national sovereignty.

What are the values the left seeks to impose on the rest of the world? One is population control. The left wants to achieve this by providing easy access to contraception to all women, including teenage girls and unmarried women. A second is the legalization of prostitution, a cause that Hillary Clinton has championed on the international stage.
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A third is no-fault divorce, so that one partner can dissolve the marriage without the other partner’s consent. A fourth is abortion, which feminist groups regard as central to female autonomy. A fifth is the elimination of the concept of the husband as the head of the household—this is seen as a violation of gender equality. The left also seeks to prohibit parents from using corporal punishment in the home. Finally the left seeks to give cohabiting couples and homosexual couples the same rights as married couples.

Seeking to avoid the stigma of foreign intervention, the left prosecutes its agenda through local “front groups.” One such group is Women Living Under Muslim Laws, an international network that promotes feminism and abortion rights in Islamic countries. While the group poses as an indigenous effort, and is typically described that way in the press, its base is in London. Its funding comes largely from the West. The affiliates listed on its Web site constitute a menagerie of Western leftist organizations: the Netherlands-based Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, the San Francisco–based Global Fund for Women, the London-based Women Against Fundamentalisms, the New York–based Equality Now, the Belgium-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the New York–based Al-Fatiha Foundation for gay, bisexual, and transgender Muslims.

Recognizing the controversial nature of its project, the left promotes its agenda through neutral-sounding rhetoric. Once the language is adopted, leftist organizations then spell out the implications and claim the rights implicit in the benign-sounding generalities. Rather than call for non-Western women to have fewer children, the left speaks of a woman’s right to determine the number and spacing of her pregnancies. While handing out contraceptives to unmarried young girls in traditional cultures, Planned Parenthood claims it is merely providing “equal access” to “family planning services.” Even as they file lawsuits to promote no-fault divorce, feminist groups justify their actions as part of an international campaign against domestic violence. (Human Rights Watch claims that domestic violence occurs in 90 percent of Muslim homes in Pakistan, a charge that virtually declares the Muslim family pathological.)
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When Planned Parenthood advocates abortion rights and performs abortions abroad, the term “abortion” is rarely mentioned; instead, the group speaks of “reproductive rights.” Patriarchy is undermined through resolutions asserting a woman’s right to “equal respect” and “equal status” in the home. Rather than insist that parents stop using corporal punishment, the left promotes “children’s rights” that include a right against cruel and unusual punishment—defined to include all forms of corporal punishment. The left seeks to legalize prostitution by speaking of “workers’ rights” and then defining the term to include “sex workers.” Feminist and gay rights groups seek to legitimize cohabitation and homosexual marriage by calling for the elimination of “discrimination” in family status, and then redefining the concept of family to include unmarried and homosexual couples.

Despite the left’s camouflage, many non-Western people are now aware of the agenda that is being thrust upon their cultures against their will. The left’s campaign against the traditional family has produced widespread social disruption and political protest in many traditional cultures. When an international coalition of liberal groups recently convinced the South African high court to legalize homosexual marriage, South Africa became the only country with a majority nonwhite population to permit gay marriage. The decision has been vociferously protested in this socially conservative country. Along the same lines, protests have erupted in Latin America over lawsuits filed by the U.S.-based feminist group Women’s Link Worldwide. Funded by the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Institute, this group seeks to overturn relatively stringent divorce and abortion laws on the grounds that these laws violate international human rights provisions. Recently the group succeeded in convincing Colombia’s high court to strike down the country’s comprehensive antiabortion law. Asian countries trying to reduce sexual trafficking have heatedly complained about resolutions at international conferences establishing prostitution as a basic right.

Let us remember that in most of the non-Western world the family is not a venue for self-expression; it is the basic unit of survival. Marriage is venerated as a social institution because children depend on their parents to raise them, and parents depend on their children to support them in old age. There is little or nothing available in the way of social security and none of these societies provides welfare to single mothers. Children are generally viewed as a blessing in non-Western cultures. In poorer societies children—especially male children—can work to supplement the family income. A large family provides better social insurance for parents as they become dependent. Very few people in traditional societies share the Western liberal view that they should have fewer children because they cannot afford more, or because children will get in the way of their life’s plans, or because birth control is a moral duty owed to the planet.

Drawing on the World Values Survey, a comprehensive study of global opinion, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris write that in non-Western cultures “both men and women willingly adhere to the traditional division of sex roles in the home. Men in these societies are not actively restricting and silencing women’s demands. Instead, both sexes believe that women and men should have distinct roles.” As a consequence, “There is a growing gap between the egalitarian beliefs and feminist values of Western societies and the traditional beliefs in poorer societies.” Rejection of homosexuality is “deeply entrenched” in the non-Western world. According to the survey, the practice is opposed by 71 percent in India, 92 percent in China, 94 percent in Iran, and 99 percent in Bangladesh and Egypt. Nor is the gap on social issues between the West and the non-West shrinking. While younger people in the West tend to be more liberal than their elders on questions like premarital sex, divorce, and homosexuality, Inglehart and Norris find that in non-Western cultures “there is usually little difference between younger and older cohorts, with the exception of abortion, where there is evidence of a shift toward greater disapproval among younger generations.”
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Nowhere is the resistance to the cultural left’s agenda more vehement than in the Muslim world. Commenting on the global feminist agenda on an Islamic Web site, Khalid Baig writes, “It is hard to imagine a more diabolical and wicked program to destroy Muslim societies from within, and create the same mess there as is visible in the Western world.”
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While Muslims have no objection to family planning, they are deeply insulted by the efforts of Western groups to pressure Muslim families to have fewer children. Abortion is another issue in which there is virtual unanimity among Muslims. One of the Prophet Muhammad’s most celebrated reforms was to stop the bedouin practice of killing newborn girls. Muslims view their opposition to abortion as deriving from a principle of life’s sacredness that was established at the very beginning of Islam. Consequently many Muslims are enraged when leftist groups like Planned Parenthood use American money and influence to promote abortion rights and abortion services in Muslim countries.

Muslim revulsion reaches its apex on the issue of homosexuality. The Koran describes homosexuals as “people of the wrath of Allah,” and most Muslims find the notion of legitimizing what they perceive as sinful conduct to be disgusting and unspeakable. One can only imagine the Muslim reaction to televised scenes of homosexual men exchanging marriage vows in San Francisco and Boston. A columnist for the Egyptian newspaper
Al Akhbar
describes homosexuality as “one of the most loathsome acts of which anyone can be accused.” Another writer for the same publication remarks, “What moral debasement has been reached? And yet there are people in the West who defend them, claiming human rights! What human? What rights?” A writer for another Egyptian weekly says of homosexuals, “All the Eastern cultures despise them, just as we do in Egypt. They arouse our loathing and nausea.” A lecturer at Cairo’s Al Azhar University comments, “We must caution our children against this accursed disease. If these perverts proliferate, the honor of the entire society will be violated.”
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However uncharitable these sentiments—and I find them appallingly so—they do not indicate Arab unfamiliarity with homosexuality. Some Arabs are quite familiar with it, and more. “You have no idea what goes on in the desert,” one Saudi businessman told me. “But this does not mean we endorse it as a society. If we accept homosexual marriage, what comes next? Are we then going to have to legalize marriage between a man and his camel?”

MUSLIM PROTESTS AGAINST
interference in their social institutions have not gained much sympathy in the West because the Muslim family has such a bad reputation. So negative is the image of the Muslim family that even conservatives take pride in championing women’s rights and sometimes even homosexual rights in the Muslim world. Laura Bush pointed to the liberation of the Afghan women as one of the great benefits of the overthrow of the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11. While we can all rejoice in the sight of Afghan women who are now free to uncover their faces, travel outside the home, vote, and work, we should remember that women enjoy these rights in most Muslim countries, including fundamentalist Iran. So the strong prejudice of many Americans against the Muslim family still requires explanation.

I think one reason for it is the Muslim practice of polygamy. For Americans across the spectrum, even homosexual marriage is a less freakish prospect than polygamy. The typical American woman cannot even imagine living in a household where she shares her husband’s affection with other wives. Americans are also offended by other forms of gender discrimination that seem religiously mandated in Muslim countries. Sharia law decrees that Muslim women inherit half of what men inherit, and the testimony of a Muslim woman in court carries half the weight of the testimony of a man. Muslim men can easily divorce women, but Muslim women cannot easily divorce men. Women are concealed in veils and burqas while men do not hesitate to wear Western-style clothing. Male infidelity is ignored while women who are suspected of premarital sex or adultery bring shame and dishonor on their families. Sometimes such dishonor is avenged by “honor killings,” in which the disgraced family wreaks their vengeance either on the girl or her mate. These honor killings provoke unmitigated revulsion in the West.