Reply #95: No one is asking you to limit someone else's human rights

[jobycom]

But the mentality that it is our duty to tell every culture what they should believe or accept on every issue is what leads to what we did to Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place. It's the first step in the dehumanization process that must occur before we start a war or, less dramatically, craft our diplomatic relationships.

You say women don't have a voice in that choice, but that's not exactly true. The women Hughes was speaking to here, and in Egypt and Turkey, are telling her that they are offended by the Western assumptions about them, that they are unhappy, or feel that they are not equal. These aren't the brainwashed drones of the poor, these are female doctors who studied medicine at western universities, who know full well the status of women in the West. THEY are the ones telling Hughes that her concerns are not theirs.

The women's suffrage movement in America, not to mention the Civil Rights movement and Abolition, all came from within America, not from outsiders forcing their views on us. We were one of the last nations to end slavery, and while the rest of the world pressured us to do it, they didn't have the ability to force us. If they had, North and South may have united against the outside presence and prolonged slavery.

Hughes is supposed to be on a "listening tour," learning the world's complaints of our behavior. Instead, she's lecturing them on how they should be behaving. That's bad policy, and counter-productive to her goal. I'm not saying we should openly endorse non-suffrage and gender segregation. But the arrogance of condemning other nations for what they do while their biggest complaint is that we have a habit of killing--though not in a gender biased way--large numbers of people for being the same religion as them... It's just not going to achieve ANYTHING we want to achieve, and it's naive in the worst way.

Don't forget that those who landed in the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries felt that they were improving the lives of the Native Americans by bringing them their most cherished right--Christianity. The bias of those Europeans caused genocidal slaughter of millions and millions of human beings. These "explorers" had no doubt they were helping all these people, even the ones they killed.

Cultural arrogance leads to dehumanization which leads to slaughter, even with the most noble of intentions. And don't say that's extreme, because one of Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq and Afghanistan was to bring them our version of "freedom." A quarter of a million people, at least, were killed in a couple year's time because of those invasions.