Moral Relativism At It's Worst

Sometimes, an article comes along in the 'Daily Fail' that makes you long for the impeccably-argued, calm and reasonable 'CiF' article by Sunny Hundal or Johann Hari.

As Tweeted by Tom Harris yesterday, Liz Jones' article is one such:

Two very different teenage girls made headlines around the world last week. The first was Emma Watson, the 19-year-old star of the Harry Potter movie franchise.

She was named as the highest-earning female in Hollywood in 2009, only one of two women to make it on to the list of the industry’s top 20 earners.

The second was 16-year-old Medine Memi – her first name means ‘civilisation’. Her body was discovered tied to a chair in a hole in the garden of her home in a small village in south-eastern Turkey.

What unites these two then?

The richest (and I hesitate to use the word powerful here) woman in Hollywood is also necessarily the weakest: a child.

The most powerful men are inevitably all ancient and unglamorous with old-lady arms: James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and their ilk. Like Islam, Hollywood is a clannish, backwards-thinking, oppressive, patriarchal society intent on keeping women firmly in their place.

Wha..?

Seriously..? The 'Fail' paid you for this?

They'd have been better off reaching into a giant Scrabble bag and printing the random selection of letters..

I don’t mean to trivialise what happened to Medine.

Well, that's one way of looking at it...

Her murder was horrific, and the perpetrators should be punished. But all cultures, the world over, celebrate pure, young women.

Yes, but not all cultures do that by burying them alive, Liz. There's a big difference, don't you think?

Oh. It's apparent you don't think:

...can we in the West really claim the moral high ground when it comes to condemning these ‘honour’ killings’?

The answer's 'Yes'. It's a bit of a no-brainer, actually...

I would counter that the number of women harmed psychologically and physically by the West’s obsession with extreme youth far outstrips the number of women who are murdered for adultery, or even for the ‘crime’ of being the victim of rape in Islamic countries.

I can't believe someone is advancing such a stupid suggestion in the pages of a mainstream newspaper in 2010. This would have been laughed out of a womyn's studies group meeting at Lancashire Poly in 1967!

Every society has things it should be ashamed of. We have battered wives, domestic violence, child abuse, rape. These crimes are not done in the name of religion, other than as part of our cult of worshipping only women who are barely adolescent.

Yes, we 'worship' them by giving them shedloads of money and fame.

Get back to me for some outrage when we start tying them to chairs and burying them alive...