The DWR Sunday Religious Disservice: The Taliban’s Fear of Educated Women

@Steve

That comparison does not work.

The Michelle Obama remark was ugly and should be condemned. But MAGA, whatever one thinks of it, is not the Taliban. The Taliban are a theocratic regime using state power to exclude girls and women from education, employment, public life, and basic freedom.

That distinction matters.

Turning Afghan women’s oppression into an American partisan dunk recentres the conversation on domestic tribal hatred instead of the women and girls actually living under Taliban rule. A crude insult is bad. A governing religious regime burying half a country’s human potential is something else entirely.

Americans across their political divides still share more civic assumptions with one another than either side shares with the Taliban: elections, women’s education, public dissent, legal equality, and the idea that government can be opposed without being replaced by theocracy.

Criticize the remark. Criticize Trump’s failure to condemn it. But equating American political opponents with the Taliban is not moral clarity. It is tribal overreach

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Steve, I think this is a much stronger objection than the first comment, because you are pointing to actual tendencies and actions rather than just using “Taliban” as a partisan insult.

And yes, some of what you list is genuinely concerning. Crude remarks about women should be condemned. Demeaning female journalists should be condemned. Any attempt to politicize military promotions should be scrutinized. Religious triumphalism inside state institutions should be treated seriously. And the Epstein material deserves full transparency, not partisan damage control.

But that still does not make the United States the Taliban.

There is a difference between an administration with ugly, illiberal, religious, or misogynistic tendencies and an actual theocratic regime using state power to erase women from education and public life.

Afghan girls are not simply being insulted by powerful men. They are being legally barred from secondary and higher education. Women are being pushed out of public life, work, mobility, and civic participation under a religious regime that does not permit ordinary political opposition.

Apples & Oranges. 

If the claim is, “there are worrying theocratic impulses in parts of the American right,” I can discuss that. If the claim is, “some American conservatives have contemptible views about women,” I can discuss that too.

But if the claim is, “MAGA is basically the Taliban,” then no. That collapses scale, law, coercion, and lived reality.

It also recentres Afghan women’s suffering around American partisan hatred. The Taliban are not a metaphor for people you dislike. They are an actual regime doing actual harm to women and girls right now.

Criticize Trump. Criticize Hegseth. Criticize misogyny wherever it appears.

But do not flatten every bad thing into the same moral category. That is not analysis. It is tribal escalation.

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Fair enough, Steve — if your claim is only “there are some things in common,” then yes, I can grant that.

Authoritarian movements often share family resemblances: contempt for dissent, patriarchal instincts, religious certainty, hostility toward liberal norms, and a desire to control public morality. Those things are worth noticing and criticizing wherever they appear.

But “things in common” is a very low bar.

The important question is whether the comparison clarifies more than it distorts. And in this case, I think it distorts badly.

The Taliban are not simply men saying ugly things about women. They are a governing theocratic regime legally excluding girls and women from education, employment, mobility, and public life. That is not the same category as a political movement inside a still-functioning constitutional democracy, however much one dislikes that movement.

If the argument is “some parts of the American right contain dangerous religious and misogynistic tendencies,” we can discuss that.

If the argument is “there are people around Trump whose views on women deserve condemnation,” I agree.

But when the original comparison is attached to a post about Afghan girls being erased from education, the effect is to pull the conversation away from them and back into American partisan warfare.

And “we can do something about MAGA but nothing about the Taliban” is not really a moral argument. It is an argument for domestic political usefulness. It says, in effect, that Afghan women’s suffering matters less because they are less available as a lever in our own politics.

I do not accept that.

We can speak honestly about the Taliban. We can support Afghan women. We can pressure our governments. We can defend asylum. We can refuse to let their suffering become merely a metaphor for our preferred domestic enemies.

Criticize MAGA all you want. But Afghan women deserve to remain the subject of a post about Afghan women.

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