Liberal democracies committed to both justice for cultural minorities and justice for women face a genuine dilemma when these commitments conflict. This chapter accepts the feminist contention that the pursuit of gender equality is a crucial and valuable goal of liberal democratic societies. As Susan Okin put it, feminism means “the belief that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can.” The other half of the dilemma, justice for cultural minorities, requires greater elaboration since there is greater disagreement about what this requires. This chapter offers an argument for why liberal democracies should grant special accommodations to minority cultural groups and what the limits of accommodation should be, a position I call rights-respecting accommodationism, which provides a framework for addressing the problem of internal minorities.

I start from a value fundamental to liberal democracy, the idea of equal respect, and offer an interpretation of what equal respect in relations of culture and identity might entail. I argue that differential treatment through a range of accommodations is sometimes required to treat members of minority cultural groups with equal respect. Citizens express mutual respect for one another not simply by accepting a set of basic rights and opportunities that apply equally to all. Under certain circumstances, equal respect requires going beyond uniform treatment toward differential treatment.