Idea Casting
I’m preparing for my lectures at the University of Denver on “Globalization and Poverty.” In doing so, I’ve been thinking of how the free movement of information is changing the world. When I was in Iraq in April I had a lot of interesting conversations, but one was especially memorable. A very conservative lady came up to me and pointed her finger at me and said, “We don’t want this American democracy, in which the man marries the man and the woman marries the woman. I have seen this on the television!” Since I don’t think that the issue of gay marriage is the single thread from which all other issues of liberty hang, I merely responded, “Ok. Then you don’t have to choose it. Some countries will have it and others won’t, but you cannot tell other countries that they can’t have it.” She evidently didn’t know quite what to say, since I had told her that that decision was for her and other Iraqis to decide, not for me. Interestingly, two other women who were standing nearby stepped forward and said to her, “And what concern would that be of yours, anyway? You are married to a man. Live your life in your marriage and don’t tell others how to live.” I was a little surprised. Reasonable ideas can spread around the world rather quickly, thanks to television, the internet, radio, and all the other marvels of the modern world. I don’t expect gay marriage to be on the top of the agenda in Iraq any time soon (they have rather more pressing issues at the moment, like defeating jihadi and Ba’athist terrorists), but the idea does seem to be finding support in more places than one might have expected.
Very interesting story — but I interpret it a bit differently — the reasonable idea that is spreading here is “And what concern would that be of yours, anyway?”
“Live and let live, mind your own business, let individuals do as they wish so long as they respect the same right of others” — this notion can come pretty easily to people in widely different cultures. I often suspect that it is a “natural” idea, implicit in human society, and has to unlearned via anti-libertarian ideologies, religions, etc.
You are quite right that free movement of information threatens these anti-freedom ideologies, I think simply by giving individuals a chance to consider alternatives.
“And what concern would that be of yours, anyway? You are married to a man. Live your life in your marriage and don’t tell others how to live.”
Woah!
I think I’m in the same boat as Nacim: Whoa! For that to be said in Baghdad after years of Saddam Hussein bodes well for the future of Iraq.
I’d not want to read too much into the remarks. The one woman had heard of the idea and didn’t like it (and associated it with democracy), the others expressed (as Mr. Steele notes) a simple live-and-let-live attitude, which is indeed a healthy thing. Let us hope that that idea spreads throughout the country. But a necessary condition for such peaceful toleration there is the securing of civil peace, which requires a mixture of force and artful and good-faith bargaining.
Tom says of the woman in the anecdote:
“The one woman had heard of the idea [of gay marriage]and didn’t like it (and associated it with democracy)”.
Well, it’s clearly wrong to associate that particular idea with “democracy”. It keeps getting voted down by fairly wide margins whereever a referendum is held. It seems some Iraqis have as much trouble as most Americans at distinguishing between democracy and freedom.
RL