Counter Revolution in Afghanistan and Texas.
America is not so terribly different from Afghanistan.
We are seeing a backlash against the modern, diverse, women-empowered, gender flexible cosmopolitan sensibilities.
The news is coming from two different continents. It would be easy to miss the obvious. Americans across the political spectrum are experiencing guilt over the Taliban takeover.
News and commentary worry about the future state of women in Afghanistan. They will be pulled from schools, returned to the authority of their fathers and brothers, be pushed into forced marriages, returned to being servile baby-makers under the thumb of conservative religious-legal authority. Self-empowered moral scolds--religious vigilantes--will beat and possibly kill women who presume equality and agency.
Afghan men of moral conviction can once again punish people. Women of childbearing age hold a special place in society. Their reproduction can be controlled, indeed commandeered. The Hindustan Times reports:
The Taliban, fighting with Afghanistan forces to take control of a large part of the war-torn country, has issued a statement ordering local religious leaders to give them a list of girls over 15 years of age and widows under 45, reports have said. According to reports, the Taliban has promised for them to be married to their fighters and taken to Pakistan's Waziristan, where they will be converted to Islam and reintegrated.
Seen from their point of view, this is re-establishing Afghan greatness. It is submission to God's will, making a more godly country by suppressing modern immorality and empowering everyday citizens to carry out this work. I do not doubt that the Taliban feels fully justified, having won the power to do this after a 20-year war, and with the support of fundamentalist Muslims .
Meanwhile, in Texas.
The Texas legislature figured out a way to ban abortion. It was cleverly done. The law circumvents legal protections for women. If this were a Texas government ban on abortions, enforced by police, the law would trigger constitutional protections of "due process of law" and "equal protection." America is free in part because law and tradition have established there are things the government cannot do.
The mechanism for banning abortion is a bounty paid to citizen complainants who allege that someone assisted an abortion. That person gets a $10,000 award, plus attorney fees. If the complaint is found groundless, there is no cost or consequence. The result is a free-range of potential debilitating lawsuits by citizens against citizens. Citizen vigilantes can do what government cannot.
Who can be sued? Anyone involved in the abortion--the doctor, a clinic and its employees, a spouse, a therapist, someone who drives her to the bus station to travel to Oklahoma--anyone except the woman herself, who might be a sympathetic victim. Vigilante threats work.
I do not doubt that Texas legislators act out of belief that they are doing the godly and moral act--protecting the unborn. They are empowering citizens to carry out the important work of creating public morality. They have power won at the ballot box and no doubt feel fully justified in doing this.
My readers who are appalled by both the Taliban and Texas need to recognize that this is a popular movement, or at least a popular-enough movement. The Taliban entered Kabul to cheering crowds. Not everybody cheered, but enough did. In Texas there is vigorous opposition to the abortion law, but the legislators are aware that enough of the right voters are delighted--the Republican segment of the electorate, especially Evangelical Christians.
Worldwide, there is a backlash against Enlightenment liberalism. People oppose this secular, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic world in which women have equality and agency, and religion is a matter of choice. This modern world is not God-centered, with truth revealed in ancient texts. It is secular and scientific.
Texas is not the Taliban. Texas wants to restore a more godly polity by empowering citizens to stop the immorality of women seeking abortions and independent agency over their own reproduction. By contrast, the Taliban wants to restore a more godly polity by empowering citizens to stop the immorality of women seeking abortions and independent agency over their own reproduction.
See the difference? Hint: There isn’t any.