SACRAMENTO, CA - Earlier this year, in the village of Meerwala in rural Pakistan, an 11-year-old boy of the Gujjar tribe, a group considered low class, was spotted walking, unchaperoned, with a 30-year-old woman from the upscale Mastoi tribe. Locals were not about to tolerate some lower-class punk getting uppity with a lady of the gentry.

They have in those parts something called a Panchayat, or tribal jury. This august body, which included Mohammad Ramzan, uncle of the Mastoi woman, decreed that as punishment for the “insult,” and “illicit affair,” the boy’s 18-year old sister should be gang raped. The girl, as it happened, was a pious type who used to teach the Quran to children. This character reference, like the fact that she had committed no crime, did not impress the jurors, who ruled that if she did not consent to this punishment every woman in the boy’s family should be raped.

On June 22, four members of a tribal council dragged the girl into a mud hut, where they took turns raping her. But the punishment did not end there. The appointed rapists then forced the girl to walk home naked, in front of 1,000 onlookers, who watched without protest. These events rightfully drew condemnation from around the world, but the protest packed a secondary meaning.

One of the orthodoxies of political correctness is multiculturalism, the notion that all cultures have the same value. Therefore, by politically correct reasoning, affluent westerners in democratic countries with Judeo-Christian roots have no right to criticize what goes on in other countries. It’s all relative, as they used to say in the sixties. This politically correct ethos is so pervasive that, as George Orwell said, it makes the stating of the obvious a duty.

A culture that sentences an innocent 18-year-old girl to be gang raped for a perceived slight committed by her 11-year-old brother is not the same as a culture where such savagery is unknown, not to mention forbidden by the rule of law. Those decrying the mandated gang rape signaled by their protest that all cultures are not equal. Otherwise there would have been no protest, only explanations that, however outrageous it might seem to us, such rape is part of their culture and to criticize it is racist, and so on. The substitutionary punishment also deserves attention.

It would not be right to punish an 11-year-old busted for shoplifting by jailing his innocent18-year-old sister. The perpetrator of a crime must pay, not someone else. Group membership should not incur guilt for crimes committed by others, but it does under political correctness.

Government race and gender preferences, for example, punish people who have never oppressed anybody, in the belief that this will compensate for acts committed by others, hundreds of years ago. The push for slavery reparations would do the same, on a massive scale.

Those who believe in punishing people for infractions committed by others, or who maintain that all cultures are morally equivalent, should pause to think before protesting the incidents in Pakistan. And those who think that political correctness is a myth should read The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty On America’s Campuses, by Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate, a new book from the Free Press.

K. Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.