Female genital mutilation / apartheid with no emigration hypotheticals

[Sandy Levinson]

Eugene writes:

 If I might repeat my earlier hypo, what if the child had
been a girl brought to U.S. by a mother who wanted to spare her from undergoing a cliteridectomy (and who died trying to thus spare her), or a mother who wanted her to escape apartheid (again, in a hypothetical South Africa that didn't allow free emigration)?  Of course, if one says that the
girl need not be returned to face genital mutilation, one then opens the oor (as Sandy points out) to Iran refusing to let a child be returned to he U.S. to be exposed to Satanic cultural influences.  I guess my answer to that is "So what? Iran is wrong and we're right."


As a matter of fact, I substantially agree with Eugene in this particular hypo.  One of the things it demonstrates, though, is the foolishness of looking for "neutral principles" in regard to such issues.  I presume that it is clear that there is simply no difference, at this point, between law and politics, because our view as to what should be done inevitably requires us to make a decision on the merits about the degree of awfulness of the regime in question, and I probably don't go along with the demonization of the Castro regime (i.e., I don't put it in the same category as North Korea, Iraq, or, for that matter, the People's Republic of China, even as I join the rest of the American public in looking forward to the day when Castro leaves the scene and a home-grown Velvet Revolution (and I earnestly hope it *is* homegrown, rather than led by the Miami fanatics) takes over.  I confess, incidentally, that one reason I am relatively unsympathetic to the Cuban exiles is that I view them as, at best, only minimally committed to liberal democracy.  No doubt, Elian would be better off, in a number of ways, to be raised here than in Cuba.  But I seriously doubt that the Miami community that seeks to capture him and use him for their own political purposes is significantly less totalitarian in ethos than their hated opponents.  Isn't it a common adage that one always ends up remarkably like the objects of one's obsessive hatreds, in part because one always believes that one has to fight fire with fire and that nice guys do indeed finish last when facing down thugs.

I'd apologize for the political tone of this comment except that I do believe what I said earlier that there is simply no apolitical way of analyzing young Elian's plight.

Sandy