MAYBE CONSERVATIVES REALLY SHOULD BE QUIET (From Best of the Web)

Genital Cutting Shows Signs of Losing Favor in Africa (Mark Lacey, NY Times, 6/8/04)

Isnino Shuriye still remembers the pride she felt years ago when she leaned over each of her three daughters, knife in hand, and sliced into their genitals. . . .

This was something her mother had done before her. She started as an apprentice while still an adolescent by holding down girls' legs for her mother to perform the rite, which opponents call genital mutilation. "I thought my mother would curse me from the grave if I didn't carry on the tradition," she said.

When female genital mutilation first came to the attention of main stream America a few years ago, conservatives had some fun tweaking liberals about how they couldn't be judgmental and impose the standards of our culture on other cultures. The point was, of course, that female genital mutilation is a good example of something that is obviously wrong and for which our culture can make no accomodation. In turn, conservatives suggested that there might be other facets of foreign cultures that we should feel free to condemn.

We should have known better. Now the New York Times is using for female genital mutilation the same sort of pc circumlocution they use for partial birth abortion.

Americans should be well-acquainted with this engine of social change. Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution carefully traces the steps by which American pamphleteers were pushed towards independence by the English insistence on demonstrating the ridiculous logical consequences of the American arguments. Similarly, as the gay marriage debate has recently demonstrated, today's slippery slope is tomorrow's inevitable progress.

Posted by David Cohen at June 11, 2004 4:40 PM