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More neocon illusions about Europe and Islam
Along with the elimination of the words “husband” and “wife” that logically must result from the recognition of homosexual marriage, is the elimination of the words “father” and “mother.” And this is not just a prediction. It has already happened. As George Weigel writes in Commentary:
Earlier this year, five days short of the second anniversary of the Madrid bombings, the Zapatero government, which had already legalized marriage between and adoption by same-sex partners and sought to restrict religious education in Spanish schools, announced that the words “father” and “mother” would no longer appear on Spanish birth certificates. Rather, according to the government’s official bulletin, “the expression ‘father’ will be replaced by ‘Progenitor A,’ and ‘mother’ will be replaced by ‘Progenitor B.’” As the chief of the National Civil Registry explained to the Madrid daily ABC, the change would simply bring Spain’s birth certificates into line with Spain’s legislation on marriage and adoption. More acutely, the Irish commentator David Quinn saw in the new regulations “the withdrawal of the state’s recognition of the role of mothers and fathers and the extinction of biology and nature.”Weigel also has some critical words for Bruce Bawer’s book on the Islam threat:
Bawer suggests that Europe can regain its nerve, and defend its free societies, by rejecting multicultural political correctness while retaining the political expression of skepticism and relativism: freedom concretized in law as radical personal autonomy. But it is radical personal autonomy that has helped lead Europe into steep demographic decline; it is radical personal autonomy that has brought Europe to denigrate its own civilizational achievements, seeing in its history only repression and intolerance; and it is radical personal autonomy that underwrites political correctness and its corrosive effects on Europe’s capacity to defend itself against internal Islamist aggression.Ok, so Weigel thinks that the left-liberal belief in radical personal autonomy is incompatible with the preservation of the West against Islam. But of course Weigel, a neoconservative ideologue, thinks that the neoconsevative belief in universal individualism is compatible with the preservation of the West against Islam. So his article is just another instance in which the proponents of right-liberalism (calling themselves conservatives) attack left-liberalism as the source of all social and political problems. But while right-liberalism is far less toxic than left-liberalism, it also is incapable of preserving the West. Thus in this article, as in so many other neocon articles deploring the state of Europe, America is barely mentioned, implying that these problems do not affect America and that only Europe lacks the will to defend itself from Islam. Yet at this moment, America no less than Europe continues to import sharia- and jihad-supporting Muslim immigrants. If Weigel doesn’t even acknowledge the problem, how can he possibly solve it? Also, Weigel’s favored solution to the Islam menace in Europe is to “integrate” the Muslims—a panacea based on the neocon belief that all humans are basically the same and at least potentially share the same devotion to universal individual rights. Weigel approvingly quotes the Italian politician and writer Marcello Pera’s call for a revivification of European traditional morality, culture, and civilization. But what can such a renewed culture consist of, and how would it defend itself from Islam, when, as made clear from Weigel’s discussion and his quotes of Pera, its main principle is the neocon idea of universal human rights? Like Mark Steyn and other unserious conservatives, Weigel correctly notes the moral and spiritual rot that has driven Europe to surrender to Islam, but he never says what the morally renewed Europe he hopes for should actually do about Islam. His implication is that if Europe solved its moral relativism problem, its Islam problem would magically go away by itself, without the Europeans having to bother themselves with it. By attacking the easy target of moral relativism, while ignoring the threat of Islam, Weigel embodies the very moral cowardice in the face of Islam of which he accuses the Europeans. The Europeans use moral relativism to wish away the Islam threat, and Weigel uses the chimera of a universally shared belief in democracy to wish away the Islam threat. Both the Europeans and Weigel have their heads in the sand.
As a further indication of where Weigel is coming from, the word “immigration” only appears twice in the article, in the context of his saying that Muslim immigration is a response to low European birthrates. In Weigel’s world, the truth can’t even be seen through a telescope that Muslim immigration happened because the Europeans, just like the Americans, decided that all racial and cultural discrimination is wrong. And why did they decide that it is wrong? Because of the belief that all human beings are basically the same. Sure, Europe and America have their respective variations on this liberal belief. The Europeans subscribe to a brand of left-liberal multicultural relativism which activately embraces and subsidizes the most extreme and hostile Muslim behavior, the Americans to the right-liberal dogma that all humans have the same rights and the same respect for others’ rights (a view that nevertheless tends to morph into multicultural relativism, as we can see in the support of many “conservatives” for sharia-type democracy and the amnesty of 12 million illegal aliens). But the two belief systems come to the same thing: all discrimination is wrong; all people from all cultures must be permitted into the West as our proof that we reject that wrong; and any disasters that result from that policy must never be blamed on the fact that we welcomed millions of unassimilable aliens into our society. Instead, the disasters must be blamed on the fact that we haven’t yet tried hard enough to assimilate the aliens, due to our rejection of, or our unsufficient devotion to, the transcendent idea of the universal sameness of all people. Email entry |