Recently I was accused of being intolerant of "Arab culture" on the basis that I believed that honor killings are wrong. Typically speaking, an honor-killing means murdering a young woman who violates a cultural taboo, such as wearing forbidden clothing or talking to a boy from outside her family. They're apparently very common in the Middle East and there is a fear that they're becoming more prevalent amongst the Middle Eastern diaspora.
I was surprised at the allegation, and immediately had to analyze it. Now, the offenses that typically lead to a woman being targeted for death are not just commonplace, they're almost natural. Expected. Part of healthy social immersion. Some of the "crimes" didn't just seem out-of-place, but the seemed patently unfair. I remember a news report from my childhood where a woman was raped and her family retaliated by killing her. One man explained simply: she shouldn't have been raped, and if she was raped, it's her fault.
The victims are exclusively female; because the rules are gender dimorphic, it is impossible for a man to commit a crime with an honor-killing as its sentence. That was offensive to my sensibilities right out, and I was given pause. Of course I'm going to disagree with someone being punished for something I consider to be a normal human activity, but then, I'm also going to insist that someone doing something I consider to be a crime be punished.
In one breath, I'm accusing the woman of being innocent and the killer of a crime. What they consider execution and thus an act of justice, I consider a murder. Now, it helps that I believe all forms of execution to be murder and that only the most exigent of circumstances could possibly pardon any form of killing but defense of the self and the explicit and immediate defense of others.
But what makes my cultural assumption (that killing a child for talking to a boy is wrong) any more accurate than the assumption that not worshiping Jesus is wrong? How do I weigh my personal intolerance against a broader scope of intolerances? The answer came in the best way I could have hoped for: an evolving liberal culture that frowns on honor-killings. That way, I can dismiss the honor-killing culture as a negative offshoot, a rotten branch of individuals to be weighed against the virtuous culture that I happen to agree with.
But at the end of the day, I decided that I just had to weigh the facts and decide when it's okay for me to be intolerant. This is one of those times.
