This past week I've been reading a book called "Culture & Equality" by Brian Barry (can be found
here) and it opened my eyes to the supremacy of liberal political philosophy - especially in dealing with the so called Cultural War. I strongly recommend it to those who want to understand the basis of liberalism and how it differs from conservatism and right or left wing radicalism. The book also contains a well argued critique of radical multiculturalism from a liberal point of view. "Culture & Equality" is one of the best (and most fun!) academic books about liberalism that I have ever read.
Let me share a quote (page 278):
"The fundamental error made by [leftist radical scholars] Iris Young and Nancy Fraser, from which their sociological and political mistakes flow, is the rejection of the liberal contention that it makes sense to talk about equal rights, and that the case for equal rights can be made on the basis of an appeal to justice.
It is not necessary first to establish the equal value of whatever activity is to be protected by the right in question. To make the point, let us think about the equal liberty of religious worship. Because religions have incompatible propositional content, it would be absurd to suggest that they had to be publicly affirmed to be equally valuable. But the [liberal] case for giving different faiths the same rights does not depend on any such absurd claim: it can be derived from a principle of fair treatment. In the same way, the whole point of the liberal case for equal rights for homosexuals is that it quite explicitly leaves each person to form a view about the relative value of heterosexual and homosexual ways of life
[all emphasises are mine, and let me add that the same thing could be said about abortion: in the absence of any uncontroversial criteria for deciding whether a fetus is a "human person" or not, the decision belongs to individuals, perhaps (if they are religious) in a joint conversation with their church].
[Barry continues:] Andrew Sullivan has recently written in The New York Times that he finds it 'hard to figure out' his 'liberal friends who support every gay rights measure they have ever heard of but do anything to avoid going into a gay bar with me'. Would he find it equally hard to figure out friends who enthusiastically support freedom of worship but would do anything to avoid attending a Roman Catholic mass with him? If not, why not? Perhaps his friends dislike equally the institutionalized 'gay scene' and the Roman Catholic Church. That does not make them hypocrites in not calling for their suppression."
And another one (page 276):
"By rasising the stakes, Young and Fraser and those [left radicals] who think like them put at risk the survival of the liberal rights that have already been won and even more their extension so as to complete the movement towards legal equality. If 'merely civil rights' are disparaged as worthless in the absence of a 'cultural revolution', they are liable to be swept away by a [conservative] cultural counterrevolution.
(...)
They [Young and Fraser] have no way of impugning the right of the majority to give legal effect to its own version of a 'cultural revolution'. Liberals, in contrast, can argue that the politicization of culture is a gross infringement of individual liberty, whether it takes the form advocated by Young and Fraser or that pursued by the Republicans in congress."
And a last one (same page):
"The Christian Right has been able to make headway in opposing the enactment of equal rights for homosexuals by capitalizing on their [leftist radical] opponents' [false] claim that the whole point of equal rights is to make a public affirmation of homosexuality."