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own choosing. This can be dangerous, as we have seen with Catholic paedophile priests: when community leaders become the custodians of their own morals and are not subject to scrutiny, all kinds of wrongs can take place and all manner of fundamentalist tendencies thrive.
Indeed – as these articles on domestic abuse in the Amish community, via Ophelia Benson, demonstrate.
I live a few hours from Amish country in Pennsylvania, and I often go biking there because the country is beautiful. It’s surprising to me how quickly everyone has forgotten the way women are treated among the Amish. I remember approaching one as she mowed the lawn (an Amish woman’s job). Her husband, old enough to be her grandfather, immediately positioned himself between me and her. As I found out later, she is not allowed to speak to the “english”, meaning anyone who is not Amish. He was a great friendly man, but I still remember how the woman and children were looking at me, sort of a mix between fear and depression.
Before this happened, the only articles you saw on the Amish usually commented on how backward they were. A famous documentary, showed in theatres, concerned a man who left the Amish ways and tried to get his children, and how the children had such difficulty adjusting to such things as schools, or friends who were not Amish, and so on.
I’ll tell you one thing, though. There are moderates among the Amish, and they are tolerated by the fundamentalists. Rather unique among extreme religions.
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