Quote:
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Originally Posted by kittykate789
For instance, Female Genital Mutilation is horrific, yet completely acceptable in many cultures, so can we condemn it.
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“The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned
The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything
herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent
Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read
Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.” -Richard Rorty
I like that quote, because you have Richard Rorty--a rather extreme relativist--coming right out and saying that he would impose his morals on others because his morals are better. In that light, I would say that it is perfectly reasonable for non-absolutists to speak out against female circumcision, because there can be no doubt that it is a cruel practice whether or not we would want to say it is ultimately right or wrong. I think we can safely ignore such abstracts in the face of such cruelty.