The author is right when he says that cultural relativism takes us down a dangerous path; he is right that we must draw lines. But he’s wrong when he presumes that people in the “East” are backwards child-marrying barbarians, while people in the West are enlightened and feminist.

When I see arguments like this, I almost think that conservatives have a point.

How many Americans would argue that marrying a child to an elderly man is okay? A few Mormon nutcases on the Utah-Arizona border?

Americans are by no means morally pure, but there are some things that we take for granted that much of the rest of the world does not. For example, the Pew Center’s report from earlier this year demonstrated that 71 percent of Americans do not want women to return to our “traditional” roles in society. Compare that to many Middle Eastern countries where a majority of the population opposes basic rights for women, meaning that at least some Middle Eastern women oppose their own claim to human rights.

There’s simply no comparison to how women are viewed and treated in the developed world vs. the developing world.

“A Mother’s Journey”: The American photographer Renee C. Byer took this picture as part of a series about a single mother with five children and a son suffering from terminal cancer. He died in 2006.

The United States has one of the worst health care systems in the developed world. People get sick and people die every day because they lack access to adequate health care.

Huh? What does that have to do with a child who had terminal cancer? Is there any evidence that his death was due to a lack of access to health care? That statement is particularly offensive considering that the very next photo is of a severely disabled child who was never afforded access to the most basic life-saving medication that virtually every American takes for granted. Keep in mind that most of the third world has absolutely no accommodations for the physically disabled. There’s a reason why he’s crawling around with shoes on his hands rather than sitting in a wheelchair.

We in the West prefer our underage girls to be kidnapped and trafficked to the streets of London before being raped rather than going through the whole rigmarole of marriage.

Yes, we certainly “prefer” that. It’s certainly not the result of a small number of predators and men who’d rather not know where prostitutes come from/what they suffer. I take it that there are no children forced into sex slavery in the East?

But for me, the first thing I saw were her eyes

Yes – he is looking at the camera, but she is looking at him. It’s a pretty good representation of the inequalities in their positions.

Interference based on power gained from countless colonizations and economic exploitation of third world countries is not neo-colonialism?

So you’re basically saying that I’m “civilized” now, as an Indian because of the British? Fuck you. Take a postcolonial theory class, you white supremacist.

James is so spectacularly ignorant and repellant. The Taliban came to power in part because of US support. Does that not count as colonialism?

No it doesn’t. The Taliban were an anti-colonial movement. They fought in favour of self rule and opposed and defeated the Soviet invasion. They’re one of the reasons I’m a big supporter of colonialism. You can say what you like about the Commies but at least they were in favour of using some seriously repressive measures to get rid of child marriage and drag Afghanistan into the twentieth century. That’s more that you can say about the Taliban. For that matter it’s more than you can say ablout NATO of the people currently in charge, they’ve got no problem sucking up to child molesters if it’ll make their life easier.