I have read some of the most awful things in our links today. I feel like taking a “meadow break” (I miss Bloom County!).

To answer your question, Summer, if one believes in cultural equivalency, one has to accept this practice, because if one were to start down that slippery slope, one would have to acknowledge the existence of such things as morality, goodness in the West and America, and other such ideas that might point one toward believing that there are things in this country worth fighting for after all. Condemning a non-Western practice as immoral, in other words, puts one a step towards becoming a God-and-country type. And that certainly wouldn’t do.