The Arab Spring has revealed the ugly truth that, given the vote, the Farhans in Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey will vote to imprison gays, oppress Christians, suppress women and all the way down the long awful checklist of the Islamic formula for a moral society. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a fantasy in America, but it’s how most people agree things should be in the Muslim world. The media is selflessly dedicated to lying about that simple fact, no matter how many of their reporters get raped, taken hostage or killed, until the truth becomes impossible to conceal.
Back in cosmopolitan New York, the idea that we’re about to go the way of Cairo is absurd, but then Cairo was also once a cosmopolitan place (At least until the more cosmopolitan parts of it were burned down). Oslo, Paris and London still are, but, like Weimar, the clock of cosmopolitanism in those places is ticking down to its final hours. The secret of all societies is that they are all democracies in their own way. A government can repress its people, shoot them in alleyways and run them over with tanks– but it cannot be at odds with their values for very long.
The jet-setting dictatorship of the enlightened who clink champagne glasses over international law is a global Weimar that will collapse in a rotten heap when enough men shouting, “Allah Akbar” march through their streets. And the timeline for that is set by biology and airline schedules, but it’s also set by power and the acceptance of the inevitable.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has suggested that it might be possible to outlaw burning the Koran because it gets people killed. This is shorthand for saying it upsets Muslims, who then go out and kill people. Given a choice between doing something about the Muslims who are killing people or the freedom of speech that infuriates them, Breyer, like most of the transatlantic left, chose to do something about freedom.
But homosexuality also upsets people like Farhan Doe. What happens when they decide to kill people every time an episode of Glee airs? Do we outlaw Glee? If we can outlaw burning the Koran, then why not? If it’s a question of pressure groups, the followers of Mohammed can easily top rallies and “It Gets Better” videos. And when the time comes, they will. Is a society that is unwilling to draw the line at the Bill of Rights, really going to draw the line at Greenwich Village and Castro Street?
Why don’t we do as Farhan Doe suggests and lock up gays? Ask a liberal and the answer will be sputtering outrage, just as if you were to ask an Imam from Al-Azhar why you shouldn’t lock up gays, the response would be sputtering outrage for the opposite reason. There might be some mention of the Bill of Rights, but the Bill of Rights is dead in the age of the Living Constitution. If rights are whatever the sophistry of a panel of Federal judges says that they are, then they are no different than Bloomberg’s soda laws or Mohammed’s Burqa mandate or ObamaCare’s health insurance mandate.
In a society like this, laws are like levers. If enough pressure is applied in the right place, they get put up or torn down. Farhan Doe on his own wouldn’t be able to lock up too many homosexuals, though as a police officer, he would have plenty of discretion for taking in people on the usual charges like “Disturbing the Peace” or “Failure to Obey a Police Order” that can be used to arrest nearly anyone at any time.
But what happens when a police force has a lot of Farhan Does working on it? For the answer to that, we can take a trip to sunny Dearbornistan, where Christians were arrested for “Disturbing the Peace” and “Failure to Obey a Police Order,” which as it turned out was a legalism for “Being Christian in a place claimed by Muslims.”
Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad (not to be confused with Ron Haddad Jr of Illinois, charged with domestic terrorism) testified that a protest outside an area mosque should not be allowed to take place, because its Imam had told him that it would be worse than a thousand deaths. Presumably three of them would be worse than September 11.