All the cool kids are doing it

Normally, thinking for oneself is always preferable to succumbing to peer pressure, and standing one’s ground in the face of finger-pointing is an admirable achievement.

At least that’s what I tell the sixth graders I teach in Sunday school. Between their nascent hormones and budding awareness of “cool,” I consider it a part of my job to assure them that acceptance doesn’t have to mean giving up your values.

But last week, peer pressure was the best thing that’s happened to international affairs since the Olympics or the Internet.

Mere days after word got out about a horribly oppressive law in Afghanistan, the public outcry was so great that President Hamid Karzai promised to revise it.

The law in question forbade women from refusing their husbands sex or from leaving the house without permission. Though it pertained only to the Shia minority, the law was disturbingly akin to something found under the Taliban, the Afghan government the United States so proudly ousted in 2001.

Thankfully, the international community was quick to express their complete condemnation of the law. President Barack Obama referred to the law as “abhorrent,” and Canada, Italy and the United Kingdom threatened to withdraw troops from Afghanistan if the law was not overturned.

By April 5, Karzai succumbed to the international peer pressure and abandoned the law.

In the comfort of our cushy college lifestyle, half a world away from the women of Kabul, Kandahar and Herat, it is easy to be complacent upon hearing news such as this. After all, what can we possibly do?

Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic and draws some of its legal system from Sharia law.

By its nature, Sharia law is religious, steeped in a long cultural history and about as foreign to American eyes as it gets. How can we possibly understand it or influence change when we disagree?

Yet the events of last week prove that we can affect change, even to distant lands.

While I imagine Presidents Obama and Giorgio Napolitano and Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Stephen Harper do personally find the Afghan law disdainful, I imagine they were focused more on what their constituents found disdainful.

Politicians know that if their constituents vehemently oppose something, it is in their best interest to speak out against it.

Of course, there are plenty of other human rights abuses going on around the world.
There are plenty of human rights abuses going on right under our nose, in our own country.

But if we are to learn anything from last week, it’s that we can make a difference – in the next continent, the next country, the next county – if we raise our voices together.