OK, there is so much in this article I don’t get. For instance:
Around this time a friend of Mohammad logged on to Facebook as a teenager and chatted with Rifqa. She told him she was a Christian. The Barys wanted some answers.
“I told Rifqa we had to sit down and talk. But she avoided any such thing. I took away her laptop and disconnected her cell phone for a short time. Her mother confronted her and told her to tell the truth, saying, ’We have to talk about it; otherwise all of us may have to go back to Sri Lanka,’” Mohammad said.
She told a friend of her father that she was a Christian, so they take away her cell phone and laptop and tell her they may have to go back to Sri Lanka?
You see, they sound so reasonable (she can convert if she wants) but when they start talking about actual facts, things don’t seem to add up.
Supposedly the main reason they came here from Sri Lanka was to get medical treatment for her eye injury (and independent sources have confirmed that she did indeed receive treatment for the eye here, saving the eye itself, but not the sight in that eye). So they may not have originally intended to settle here permanently. And they wouldn’t be the first parents to immigrate to the US and decide to return to their native country when their kids starting adopting American culture, and being very rebellious towards their parents and parents’ culture. That’s a long way from threatening to kill her. I have some friends — an American born woman, and her Indian born husband, both lifelong Catholics — who met and married here in the US, and seemed settled here for a while, but then elected to move overseas, first to Switzerland and then to India, in part because they felt the cultural environment would be better for their children.
It appears that the Barys’ concerns went beyond just Rifqa’s conversion, to her sneaking around with people they didn’t know. Who knows which one really bothered them the most, but normal parents object to their teenagers spending most of their time, online and in person, with people the parents don’t know anything about.
Sri Lanka is predominantly Buddhist, and honor killings are rare there (basically nonexistent, except presumably among the Muslim Tamil Tigers guerrilla group which hangs out in remote jungles, training suicide bombers) and certainly not tolerated by the government. Mr. Bary would have a better chance of getting away with it here, and even if caught would face much less unpleasant consequences.
Here’s the bottom line :
If she has NOT been telling the truth, then she needs to face the consequences of making unfounded claims such as these.
But if what she has been saying is true then we have to ask ourselves if we going to continue to allow people freedom of religious expression or if that is something that parents can decide for their grown children.