'Protecting' Culture

'The controversy over 'pub culture' is ultimately about an inability to trust one's own judgments over others. Why seek to protect women from making their choices about their lifestyle? Why seek to protect young people (both men and women) from going out and mingling? This is because the 'moral police' believe that : first, their prescribed ways of behaviour are not likely to prevail by consent alone because people will not like them or because they will not make rational sense to others, and second, because they do not trust the capability or conscience of others in how they will lead their lives. As a result, they resort to coercion, and in the case of Mangalore, outright violence against young women and men who choose to be different from them.'

- Nitasha Kaul, 'Wine, Women, Valentine.'