ABSTRACT

In 1999, a group of British Muslims, the Al-Muhajiroun, pronounced a death sentence on the playwright Terrence McNally. McNally had written a play, Corpus Christi, in which Jesus Christ was portrayed as a homosexual. According to the Dutch Constitution, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is prohibited. A familiar attitude with regard to practices people do not agree with, or even those they would characterize as abhorrent, is that of the enlightened liberal: live and let live. On November 2, 1999, the Dutch social-liberal political party D66 called for an investigation into the scale of female circumcision in the Netherlands. Tolerating harmful practices out of respect for another culture is also called cultural relativism. Cultural relativism conflicts with what is called American values. If cultural relativism were correct, not only would the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be a Western conceit, but so would the American values of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”.