Police in Greenfield, California, have arrested a man for selling his 14-year-old daughter to an 18-year-old guy in exchange for $16,000, 160 cases of beer and six cases of meat. But we're informed that this sort of thing is normal and acceptable in Oaxaca, where the father comes from, and that it's incumbent upon us to be culturally sensitive:
The Greenfield area has had a large influx of Oaxacans. A [power point] presentation on understanding Oaxacan culture is posted on the Greenfield police Web site.
"Arranged marriages are common in several cultures, and this is not an issue among consenting adults over the age of 18," police said in the statement. "But California has several laws regarding minors, the age of consent and human trafficking."
Police are trying to be culturally sensitive, Grebmeier told CNN, but "when I'm in Mexico, I have to respect Mexican laws. When you're in the United States, you have to respect United States laws. That's the bottom line."
He said he wanted to send a message to immigrant communities that such behavior is unacceptable. He said his department has long heard rumors of children as young as 12 being sold or offered for sale. The Greenfield police statement said arranged marriages between young girls and older men "have become a local problem."
Problem? How judgmental! All we have here is an example of what Friedrich Hayek talked about: “The existence of individuals and groups simultaneously observing partially different rules provides the opportunity for the selection of the most effective ones.”
I think we see here the Achilles heel in the proposition that a free society can be cobbled together out of people who differ on fundamental principles. Obviously any free society will, and must, enjoy and encourage a great deal of diversity and disagreement, and there ought to be a broad range for experimentation in different lifestyles. But toleration cannot be a free-for-all, or you will end up in a position where you are unable to articulate and defend a principled position of individual freedom and personal security as an objective, over-arching value. The problem with today’s pop cultural relativism is that it has abandoned the very idea of objective, over-arching values because people are afraid of being called an -ist, -ite, or -phobe. And this problem is far more severe, and far more dangerous, in the context of the war against Islamic fascism.
