Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Sex police

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: move to Religious police. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 08:32, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Sex police

The title of this article has a decidedly POV connotation, at least in my part of the English-speaking world. There is no linked WP article to suggest a better title (although I haven't yet tried to search WP for one). The tone of the quotes seems designed to prosecute a particular point of view. While this last concern may be remedied with balancing quotes, that assumes one can identify a neutral topic title that might allow for some. I'd like to sound out the community on how we might make this a more useful article, lest we need to delete it for being irreparably POV. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:41, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

• Vote closes: 00:00, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Vote extended until 00:00, 7 July 2007 (UTC), to get more Wikiquote input and see how related Wikipedia events develop. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:29, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

• Keep under a different title for the article. But which title? "Sex police" sounds as if it were something equivalent to "vice squad," an institution that has existed and still exists in cultures throughout the world. As such, it would not be inherently POV if it were given a title such as "Morality police" or the like. Police officers themselves appear to have no trouble referring to vice units or vice squads, so perhaps we're being too fastidious if we think that such names are insufficiently NPOV. The problem with this article is that it is premised in the introduction as: "Sex police is a police force in a theocracy that is funded, legally authorized, and/or recognized by the government to enforce Islamic morality. Mutaween, religious police, clerical police, moral police, morality police, or hisbah groups are synonyms for the sex police." So we are not concerned here with just any kind of morality police, but police in a theocracy. This means that the article is only applicable to societies with official, state-designated religions. It would not, for example, include vice units as still exist in the United States; on the other hand, it would not be irrelevant to American history. In ostensibly secular societies, people are not arrested in the name of religion but in the name of community standards, public decency, public morals, etc. If the article were entitled "Morality police" or the like, it could include both secular and theocratic societies. The introduction, however, goes even further in narrowing the range of potential quotations: it specifically singles out Islam and refers to the mutaween and hisbah. Perhaps, then, the article should be entitled "Mutaween" or "Hisbah," simply abandoning any attempt at an expansion of the theme and keeping an article about the morality police of Islamic societies. "Mutaween" would be preferable, since it refers to the enforcement of morality laws, whereas "Hisbah" refers to the laws themselves. I was rather shocked, by the way, when looking up "morality police" and "religious police" on Wikipedia to find that they both redirected to mutaween, as if only Islam had morality police and/or police who enforced religious law. This prompts me to suggest that we go in the direction of entitling the article "Morality police" rather than "Mutaween" or "Hisbah," so as to single out no one religion in particular in a theme which involves numerous religions. This would mean rewriting the intro as well. - InvisibleSun 02:03, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
• Keep At one point the Catholic Church had "sex police."[1] However, in contemporary times no non-Islamic government uses public revenues to fund the religious police. In Iran and Saudi Arabia and some other Islamic states the police have 100% legal authority to enforce Islamic morality. It isn't a self-styled thing. This is not something conservative Muslims in the Islamic world are ashamed of. In fact, they pride themselves in it. Plus, repeat offenders can be legally executed summarily[2].

By the way, the article has hisbah groups. --Inesculent 03:34, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

• Rename to Religious police since that's the phrase in the quotes.--Cato 21:29, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

No contest.--Inesculent 00:36, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

• Comment: I'm inclined to agree with InvisibleSun about broadening the topic to "Morality police". At w:Talk:Mutaween#Name Change: Morality police or Religious Police, I've raised the question of creating a broader "Morality police" (or equivalent) article on WP to make an umbrella collection of quotes easier. I think I'll forego a formal position on this discussion until we see how this develops here and on WP. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:02, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
• Delete more of a Wikipedia article - if not deletion, renaming to Religious police. Will ^{talk) 23:13, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
• Keep/name change I'm with InvisibleSun here and can add nothing to that argument --Herby ^{talk thyme} 07:05, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
• Move to Religious police, per InvisibleSun and Cato. There has been zero response so far to my query and suggestions at w:Talk:Mutaween. Therefore, I see no point in broadening our theme to "morality police" without supporting quotes, or needlessly limiting it to "Mutaween" given the existing quotes. (Avoiding "Mutaween" would also allow for the non-Islamic religion-based morality-enforcement quotes that I alluded to in my research on the WP article talk page.) But "sex police" does seem unnecessarily limiting. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:47, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.