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Insight: Criminalizing private morality?
Human rights are not vehicles of individualism but, in the opposite, provide protection against it.
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Religions do speak in the name of God, and rightly so, but this God-speak loses all dignity if it goes together with intolerance, threats or violence. (Shutterstock/File)
L
ast week in The Jakarta Post, Fajri Matahati Muhammadin wrote a highly critical response to United Nations high commissioner for human Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein. At the end of his visit to Indonesia, Al-Hussein had spoken out against the criminalization of homosexuality, urging Indonesians “to move forward — not backward — on human rights”.
Noting that “the rights of sexual minorities have not achieved universal or even majority recognition”, Fajri asks: “How then, does one claim the practice of a few to be the universal standard?”
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What an appalling statement! The moral dignity of a society is measured not on how the powerful, the many, the majority feel, but how they treat their underdogs, the powerless, the poor, their weak members, their minorities. This is precisely the point of human rights.
According to Fajri, human rights are the fruits of secularism and individualism and therefore of only relative validity. The opposite is true.
One of the most fundamental human rights is freedom of religion. Meaning that nobody, no state, no majority have the right to meddle in the way a person and any community of believers try to follow the right way before God.
Human rights are not vehicles of individualism but, in the opposite, provide protection against it. After modernization, sweeping the globe and eroding traditional social structures protecting the human individual, it is respect for human rights that protects against the super power of the modern state and the merciless mechanisms of capitalistic economics.
