Did I call it or what?
A few days ago, I was arguing that conservatives need to articulate a general defense of codes of modesty, one that is based on an understanding of the sacred, and one not scandalized by the diversity in standards of modest dress found in the world’s cultures. I said that if we don’t do this, the liberals aren’t going to stop with attacking Muslim sensibilities; they’re going to come after ours. Pretty soon, I said, some crazy feminists are going to demand that we let women go around topless.
Well, I’ve just seen linked from one of my favorite fellow bloggers, Oz Conservative, this:
Authorities in the city of Malmö in Sweden have decided to let women swim topless at public swimming pools. It was thought discriminatory that men should be allowed to swim bare breasted and not women. Notice the title quote of the article: “They’re just breasts.” Although framed as an issue of equality, the issue is really one of reverence. Does a woman’s body belong to the first level of being (raw material for her and our benefit) or the third (endowed with intrinsic objective meanings). (See here for a further explanation of these terms.) The chaste and pious man sees every woman as a sacred mystery. As with all sacred things, her body is set apart from the profane world; it may only be approached by a centain man, and even for him only for centain purposes and with a centain reverential attitude. The goal of these bare-breasted radicals is to tear the female body out of the realm of the sacred and throw it into the profane realm. This is the act of desecration.
Liberalism is desecration as a way of life.
Filed under: Modern fallacies |
Throne and Altar 
I am not sure I agree entirely with you. I do agree that liberalism is desecration as a way of life. But, Malmo– in particular– is pretty much Islamic completely now . Although I am not sure that the Muslims have agitated for women’s only swim times as they have every where else there is a confident Islamic population, I would ASSUME that they have. If this is the case, then I am HAPPY that the native Swedish non-Muslim women have demanded topless swimtimes. This would be in direct protest to the assumed Women only swim times.
The encroachment of sharia on Western civilization is desecration, too.
Hi Kendra,
Fighting Islamization is a worthwhile goal, but we shouldn’t do it by just embracing whatever Islam abhors. Modesty is as much a Christian virtue as a Muslim one. (I would say that chastity is even more of a Christian virtue than a Muslim one, although I admit that a Muslim observer of the contemporary West would see little evidence of this.)