Uncivilizing America

Recent Supreme Court decisions through the eyes of an immigrant.

Abortion rights protestors in Washington, D.C.

In June of 2015, I gave birth to my second child. A few hours after the ordeal of a long labor, while holding my baby as he slept calmly in my arms, I heard the news: The United States Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage. What an auspicious day on which to enter the world! I remember stroking my newborn’s wispy hair and whispering to him that he was born at the dawn of a new era. As an immigrant from Pakistan, where same-sex sexual activity is criminalized as “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” and carries the death penalty, my decision to move West was vindicated. All the heartache and adversity of living in a foreign land was worth it — my children, after all, would not come of age in a country where people had to hide their sexual orientation but rather in one where same-sex couples were granted the precise legal rights as heterosexual ones.

And then this June, almost seven years later to the day, I woke to news that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, revoking a longstanding constitutional right to abortion. After a half-century of autonomy over their bodies, women in the U.S. were once again stripped of self-determination. As Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan noted in their dissenting opinion:

Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens. Yesterday, the Constitution guaranteed that a woman confronted with an unplanned pregnancy could (within reasonable limits) make her own decision about whether to bear a child, with all the life-transforming consequences that act involves. And in thus safeguarding each woman’s reproductive freedom, the Constitution also protected ‘[t]he ability of women to participate equally in [this Nation’s] economic and social life.’ But no longer. As of today, this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare.

The consequences of this decision are playing out in real time and many have already offered excellent commentary on and analysis of what it means for American women and medical practitioners, and how it opens the door for a rescission of other protected civil rights. I shall not add to that conversation.

What I wish to observe is something else entirely that is nonetheless also certain. The distance between the West and those Islamic states that have been ritually critiqued here in the U.S. as “uncivilized” and “backwards,” often for treating women as second-class citizens, is not nearly so vast as many Americans would believe.

We can all recall the words of Laura Bush in her much touted radio address in November of 2001, shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan:

The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.

The unequal treatment of women in places like Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan has repeatedly been advanced as a defining and shameful attribute of the Other, as “deliberate human cruelty carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control.” In contrast, the U.S. frequently positions itself as savior to the downtrodden, discriminated against women of the undeveloped world. The State Department even has an Office of Global Women’s Issues dedicated to promoting “the rights and empowerment of women and girls through U.S. foreign policy.”

Of course, the rhetoric that “Muslim women need saving” reeks of the smugness inherent in colonial discourse, which legitimized occupation in the name of rescuing Muslim and Hindu women from the “barbarous” customs of their societies. And if that isn’t quite discordant enough, then complete disregard for the plight of Afghan women upon the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country — while Biden was lauded for his White House Gender Policy Council, coordinating federal efforts to advance gender equity and equality at home and abroad — has demonstrated that concern for the rights of Afghan women was a mere smoke screen for more self-interested goals. As author and activist Sonali Kolhatkar commented about the Afghan war in a radio interview in 2010:

Wars are not fought to liberate women. Wars are fought over power, but never to liberate women.

That the U.S. does not, ultimately, care about women in these ostensibly “backward” countries is not headline news. It’s out in the open and for all to see that we consistently support and pander to Saudi officials to maintain military ties and access to oil, knowing full well that the Saudi regime flagrantly violates women’s rights. Indeed, American foreign policy towards the Middle East more generally makes clear that an invocation of women’s rights has always been more about showcasing its own “civilized” status than working to help, truly and genuinely, women of the region.

The disconnect between the words and the actions of the U.S. government is not shocking or unfamiliar to me. I am on intimate terms with it, having grown up under the American backed military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan. Zia’s regime actively and unashamedly instituted laws to repress rape victims, criminalize fornication and adultery, and degrade the legal and social standing of Pakistani women. Those who advocated for women’s rights were targeted and intimidated. The U.S. supported this regime while Jimmy Carter was casting the United States as a champion of universal human rights to protect “the individual from the arbitrary power of the state,” declaring human rights integral to U.S. foreign policy and extending the ratification deadline for the Equal Rights Amendment.

Having experienced first-hand how the lives of Americans were, in practice, deemed more valuable — despite high-minded foreign policy statements — it wasn’t the double standard or hypocrisy that came as a surprise when the Court overturned Roe. But as my seven-year-old blew out the candles on his birthday cake, I quietly felt for a generation that is bearing witness to this historical moment when American women are the ones who need saving.

Postscript: The day after my son’s birthday, I woke to news that the Supreme Court had issued yet another momentous decision. In the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, it ruled 6-3 in favor of a public-school football coach who considered it his right to pray with his players on the 50-yard-line. As Justices Sotomayor, Breyer and Kagan noted in their dissent:

This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our Nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state.

And so, yet another defining virtue of Western democracy, and yet another standard by which the U.S. has judged Islamic states less “civilized,” has been undermined by this Supreme Court.

NB: The Banished podcast is on indefinite hiatus while I turn my attention to a joint project with Jeffrey Aaron Snyder on the impact of anti-CRT legislation on free speech and academic freedom in higher education — supported by the UC National Center for Free Speech. In the meantime, I will continue the Banished blog with some columns exclusive to paying subscribers. Thank you for supporting Banished!