The New York Times has published a piece condemning the U.S. military for ignoring cases of child sexual abuse in Afghanistan. And yet, a few years earlier, the Times published a piece praising military briefers who told the troops to ignore the custom of “boy play”–older men taking young boys on “Love Thursdays” to use them sexually–on the grounds of cultural relativism. Read Mollie Hemingway’s expose of the Times, linked and excerpted after the jump.
From Mollie Hemingway, Flashback: In 2007, NYT Published Op-Ed Saying Afghan Child Rape Was No Big Deal:
It’s somewhat odd for The New York Times to publish this expose of our toleration of the practice considering that in 2007 they published an op-ed critical of the military for not being more culturally relativist. As the 2007 op-ed notes, approvingly, if you can believe it, we turn a blind eye to child rape because our military bought into ideas from academic elites that it would be the right thing to do.
The point of the piece by Richard A. Shweder, an anthropologist and professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago, was that we weren’t going far enough. The piece criticizes one anthropologist for wearing a uniform and being armed and worries about anthropologists being co-opted by the military to advance military missions. Note this part:
Nevertheless the military voices on the show had their winning moments, sounding like old-fashioned relativists, whose basic mission in life was to counter ethnocentrism and disarm those possessed by a strident sense of group superiority. Ms. McFate stressed her success at getting American soldiers to stop making moral judgments about a local Afghan cultural practice in which older men go off with younger boys on “love Thursdays” and do some “hanky-panky.” “Stop imposing your values on others,” was the message for the American soldiers. She was way beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and I found it heartwarming.
That sounds like our New York Times!
And it’s a completely unsurprising argument in a time and place overrun by cultural relativism.
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