Beware the post-Protestant missionaries
by Ed West, Wrong Side of History:
Qataris are right — Western values are not universal values.
The last World Cup hosts to treat homosexual relations as a crime were arguably even more controversial than Qatar. A repressive society where gay men were often driven to suicide by official persecution, where divorce and abortion were hard to access and strict decency rules governed what could be shown even on stage, this theocratic monarchy had a long history of colonialism and slavery, not to mention religious intolerance.
[…] That’s the world as it is; the problem with Qatar is not that it’s a conservative autocracy with a poor human rights record, but that it is totally unsuited to hosting the tournament, being a tiny petrostate with no infrastructure or footballing history, and which only got the World Cup due to bribery (allegedly). Yet, for better or worse, Qatar was chosen and various western countries with very different values chose to compete.
If we condemn Qatar, it means condemning much of the world outside of the West. China hosted the Olympics in 2008 and I seem to remember the BBC duly covered that, despite the People’s Republic being far worse by most metrics. Azerbaijan was one of the hosts at last year’s European Championships, and is far more oppressive than Qatar at least measured by the dubious Freedom House.
I don’t think Qatar is heavily criticised because it’s Arab and Muslim, despite some plucky claims to make that a real argument, but its conservative social mores do trigger one of the few moral issues on which post-Protestants have any cultural confidence — sexuality.
The balance between universal human rights and the right of self-determination is not an easy one to judge, a problem addressed in one of Scott Alexander’s classic posts. In a world where different communities are free to form their own laws and social norms, on what issues do we leave everyone to their own devices, and when are rights so sacred and central that we must intervene?
To post-Protestants, of course, sexual identity comes under the latter, and it is intolerable that a gay Qatari might suffer imprisonment or worse because of his or her desires. There is a pretty strong case for that argument, yet it’s notable how vociferous and culturally confident western post-Protestants are on that issue compared to the complete silence on the issue of religious persecution.
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