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Saturday 26 May 2012

Minority rights & wrongs

Jessica Duchen returns to the subject of the Roma, while Arthur Goldhammer is troubled by the case of the Moroccan woman whose application for French nationality was refused because her Salafist beliefs were "incompatible with the values of the French community":

I confess that I find this decision profoundly disturbing. The choices and commitments this woman has made are not mine, but there is no evidence that they are anything but voluntary. If she is "submissive" to her husband, she has chosen to be so of her own free will... This...decision brings the state into the private sanctum of relations between husbands and wives and presumes to judge whether deference in a private relationship poses a threat to the state...

The fact that it attacks a profoundly illiberal religious practice, salafism, is in my view irrelevant... There is a struggle to be waged here, but it is a struggle over private conscience, which cannot be dictated by the state, and a state that forgets this is in danger of forgetting that while states may be guarantors of liberty, they may also be its annihilators.

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