It's a good starting point, yes. Now I would like to see if Ferdie can accept that the term has more than the negative dimension he always carps on. If he can't, then there's not much point arguing with him.
The problem is the difficulty of interpreting what something means. For example, take the opening gambit in the definition in Wikipedia. It says:
"Multiculturalism is an ideology advocating that society should consist of, or at least allow and include, distinct cultural groups, with equal status."
As a general principle that could be fine, but does it mean that the law as understood by one group might be different to that of another group? Are their laws enbreastled to equal status if they vary? I believe absolutely that you can't have differing laws in one society for it to operate effectively - we must all be bound by the same law in any given country.
My point is that some may interpret a statement like the one quoted above as one which ought to give equal status to differing views on the law. So it's not a bad working definition, but maybe if the debate were firstly about it means when put into practice, then we wouldn't need the arguments where everyone's starting from a differnt meaning of the term they're using.
Rifty
-- Academic and Computing Help
