‘PURE RACE’ LAW IS PURE ABSURDITY
Hurriyet
March 16 2010
Turkey
Many ideologies, value systems and beliefs have been born in the
territory that is today Turkey and many have swept our nation and
culture. Amid this, Turkey has nonetheless been essentially free of
the "pure race" notions that have taken root in many societies and
bedevil much of Europe even today. One can perhaps retroactively
debate the morality of the "devÅ~_irme" system of the Ottomans that
incorporated the children of mostly Christian minorities into the top
echelons of the ruling Muslim elite. But one positive legacy of this
is certainly the reality that Turks have never paid much attention
to ancestry nor seriously bothered with ethnic engineering – as so
many other societies have.
Sure, there was a bit of toying in the 1930s with notions of defining
a "Turkish race." Occasionally, some nonsense will surface such as it
did a couple years ago when an opposition MP demanded that President
Abdullah Gul submit to a DNA test. This nuttiness surfaced along
with the suggestion that he was crypto-Armenian and this somehow
explained his historic trip to a football match in Yerevan. That DNA
tests cannot determine ethnicity made the already offensive demand
all the more absurd.
No, Turkey, the collapsed star of empire, a sort of enduring supernova
reflecting the energies of the many peoples of Anatolia, is certainly
one of the most genetically diverse societies on earth. This has
enabled Turkey to avoid the racist fantasies of many Anglo-Saxon or
Aryan societies and comes down as one of our great strengths.
This is a long introduction to the fact we are deeply offended by
a recent law promulgated at the behest of the Health Ministry that
makes it illegal for Turkish women to seek fertility treatment abroad
if it involves the sperm or egg of a non-Turkish citizen. Ostensibly,
this is to "protect ancestry" and ensure health officials to establish
parentage. "It has nothing to do with race," argued Ä°rfan Å~^encan,
said the ministry official who spoke in our story reported yesterday.
If anything can be said to be "pure," it is the unadulterated absurdity
of Å~^encan’s argument. Of course it is about race. It smacks of the
rejection in 1999 of blood donations from abroad in the wake of the
Marmara earthquake by then-Health Minister Osman DurmuÅ~_. DurmuÅ~_’
effort to "protect Turkish bloodlines" was quickly drowned out by
more sensible voices and this is the fate this new law deserves.
Parentage is established by love, by nurture and by the commitment
of parents to protect their children, whether they be biologically
connected, adopted or the result of fertility therapy involving sperm
banks or egg donors. This is not the domain of the government; it is
the intensely personal domain of decision-making couples.
That the law is virtually unenforceable is cold comfort. It should be
rescinded, along with the racist assumptions behind its promulgation.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
