Sign here against Sharia in Britain: One law for all!

"Faith-based arbitration, where people agree to settle disputes in by the judgement of a religious figure is a highly problematic form of privatising law: using laws which are not publicly enacted, in forums which are not monitored, with no right of appeal, often within environments where women's rights are routinely subordinated to traditional and patriarchal cultures and beliefs which threaten the welfare of women and children.
Arbitration is an acitivity which should be entered into willingly: yet the ability to make an independent choices within a relationship is based in equality in social and economic choices, which is rare in society generally, is even rarer amongst those who cleave to traditional gender roles. Some women face violence for resisting pressures put on them in the name of religion or culture; many others face rejection from the family or community, isolation, financial hardships and other pressures.
The rights of equality between men and women, gay and straight, the rights to divorce and child custody on equal terms, and the criminalisation of domestic violence and marital rape have been hard-fought for by human rights activists over centuries, and continue to be fought for across the world. It is a deeply backward step for human rights to withdraw rights from the weakest and most powerless sectors of society. Women's, and children's, powerlessness will be legitimized and enforced, codified into law.
Given the central role of family in most societies, religious elites seek to strengthen their control and influence over their communities by controlling family relationships. Religious laws—especially in family matters—have long been a battleground. For many women, the family is the source of patriarchal oppression, and those forces which seek to normalise religious interference into private life are often the same ones which seek the control of women and girls.
Fundamentalism in all major religions involves similar views on gender relations and sexuality. Among other things, it seeks to establish and strengthen male-dominated control over the family and restrict women's sexual and social freedoms. Recognising a right for religious figures to intervene in family affairs priveleges the fundamentalist forces by definition, strengthening the worldwide growth of fundamentalism, and eroding women's hard won rights.
We ask our political representatives to respect and protect women’s constitutionally and internationally protected human rights by ensuring access to a single, uniform family law regime. Equally, we ask that religious freedoms of the majority not be confined to the interpretation of a limited few."

Middle-eastern women's campaign against faith-based arbitration and sharia law

Notice that you can sign under at "UK" and "Worldwide".
I urge all Atheist bloggers with any sense of justice to sign and pass this around.

Johann Hari: Rowan Williams has shown us one thing – why multiculturalism must be abandoned

"We don't need to speculate about what these British sharia courts would look like. They already exist in some mosques across Britain, as voluntary enterprises.

[...]

These are the courts that Rowan Williams would give the stamp of British law. In his lecture, he worries that this could harm women – before serving up a theological gloop, saying that sharia could be reinterpreted in a way compatible with the rights of women. But if that happens, why would you need different courts? What would be the point?

The argument that women will only have to enter these courts if they freely choose to shows a near-total disconnection from the reality of Muslim women's lives. Most of the women who will be drawn into "consenting" are, like Nasirin, recent immigrants with little idea of their legal options. Then there are the threats of excommunication – or violence – from some families. As the Muslim feminist Irshad Manji puts it: "When it comes to contemporary sharia, choice is theory; intimidation is the reality."
These courts highlight in their purest form the problem with multiculturalism. It has become a feel-good doctrine mindlessly celebrating "difference", without looking at what that difference actually means.

[...]

Multiculturalism was formed with good intentions as a counter-reaction. But it has become a mirror-image of this old racism, treating Muslim women – and others – as so different that they do not deserve the same rights as the rest of us. As the European-Iranian feminist Azar Majedi puts it: "By creating different laws and judicial systems for each ethnic group, we are not fighting racism. In fact, we are institutionalising it."
When people talk about defending Muslim culture, ask them – which culture? The culture of Irum and Nasireen, or the culture of their abusive husbands? Multiculturalism patronisingly treats immigrants as homogenous blocks – when in fact they are as diffuse and dissenting as the rest of us.

[...]

The job of a liberal state is not to stamp The True National Essence on its citizens, nor to promote "difference" for its own sake. It is to uphold the equal rights of every individual – whether they are white men or Muslim women. It has one liberal culture, with freedoms used differently by different people."

Johann Hari, Independent, 11 February 2008

Here's the same piece on his website.

I'll throw in a comment that Irshad Manji made earlier this year:

"Superficial diversity reduces all of us to external markers of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and the like. Far more meaningful to elevate ourselves to different ways of thinking. It’s high time to popularize the distinction between diversity of thought, which recognizes individuality, and diversity of appearance, which glorifies only the group."

Why the Archbishop of Canterbury is not a bleeding heart liberal

"Yet what is truly significant about the Archbishop’s statement is not his apparently liberal tilt towards respecting the customs of a competing faith. Although the focus of Williams’ speech was on the place of Sharia law in Britain, its main purpose was to argue for the re-legitimation of the role of religion in British society. As head of the Anglican Church, Dr Williams is painfully aware of the diminishing significance and influence of his institution. In Britain, there are now more Christians practising Catholicism than Anglicanism. Islam appears to motivate and inspire people in ways that many ordinary Anglicans find difficult to comprehend. The Church of England is haunted by dissension over sexual and lifestyle issues and continually struggles to uphold its international authority over the world’s 77million Anglicans.
The Anglican Church faces a crisis of authority. It finds it difficult to assert its role as the ‘established church’. And instead of looking within itself and asking probing questions about its own meaning and purpose, it prefers to blame the onward march of materialistic secularist culture for its institutional demise. Sometimes it presents itself as a beleaguered minority faith victimised by a cruel secular crusade. Some Anglicans have joined with their Catholic colleagues to decry the attempts by anti-religious forces to ban Christmas and other religious customs. Dr Williams’ speech was only the latest attempt to win more space for the exercise of religious authority in Britain. But instead of asking for greater recognition of Anglican sensibilities, Williams instead chose to put the case for the exercise of ‘religious conscience’ through demanding greater recognition of Sharia law.

[...]

In other words, he is not simply demanding more recognition for Sharia but for all forms of religious law."

Frank Furedi, Spiked, 11 February 2008

With all the right-wing paranoia about the archbishop, it is apt to get some other views.
(Ironically, not from the left)

"Many commentators are mistakenly seeing demands like the Archbishop's as “liberal”, “progressive” or “PC gone mad”. They are anything but.
Properly understood, the effect of devolving national law and national morality to local and group level is profoundly conservative. Dr Williams's ideas really represent the wilder fringes of a bigger idea: communitarianism. Communitarianism can come in a surplice, a yarmulka or from a minaret and is all the more dangerous because armed with a divine rather than a local loyalty. It almost always proves a repressive and reactionary force, fearful of competitors, often anti-science, sometimes sceptical of knowledge itself, and grudging towards the State.
There is absolutely nothing “left-wing” or woolly-liberal about empowering it. A Britain in which Muslim communities policed themselves would be more ruthlessly policed, and probably more law-abiding than today. But it would be a Britain in which the individual Muslim - maybe female, maybe ambitious, maybe gay, maybe a religious doubter - would lose their chances of rescue from his or her family or community by the State.

Matthew Parris, The Times, February 9, 2008

Btw. I really loved the introduction of Matthew Parris' article:

"You say,” said Lord Napier (confronted as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India by locals protesting against the suppression of suttee) “that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”"