There's no fun in fundamentalism

Maclean's Jonathon Gatehouse has a frightening piece on earlier drafts of that controversial law that Afghan President Hamid Kharzai wants to impose on on Shia women to score political points.

Gatehouse reports that, as first drawn up, that law would have

... set the legal age for Shia girls to marry at nine, automatically stripped divorced mothers of custody as soon as girls turned two, and boys seven, and legalized “family-style” polygamy, allowing husbands to wed their wives’ sisters and cousins.

Turns out a Canadian human rights group intervened, along with local activists.

The federally-funded, Montreal-based organization and its local partners spent months lobbying the government and parliamentarians to change the most outrageous provisions of the family code. They succeeded in watering down 10 of its 200 articles, including the marriage age, which was brought in line with the standards of the country’s civil code, 16 for girls, and 18 for boys. The age at which fathers get custody has been raised to seven for girls, and 15 for boys. But the quick passage of the law—widely perceived as an effort by President Hamid Karzai to woo ethnic Hazaras, a Shia Muslim minority who will be crucial swing voters in the August elections—has enshrined a whole host of other affronts to women’s rights. An example is an article that forbids Shia women to leave the house without the permission of their husbands or fathers except under unspecified “exceptional circumstances.”

Which would mean no school, no work, no political participation, not even getting together with other women to compare notes on their lives.

Hmmm. How far off is all that from those right-wing pro-fertility sects springing up in the US right now? Since they are all about religion while the women ''submit,''  not very.

This has led my friend Sooey to make one of her more astute -- and typically acrid -- observations. (I added the links here.)

I'm curious why there's so much outrage in the New Conservative ranks about Karzai's cave-in (haha - unintentional pun!) to the whoevers of the Islamic militants in Afghanistan re wives having to sexually submit to their husbands. I mean, that's long been a hobby horse of R.E.A.L. Women (which has nothing to do with women and everything to do with Conservatism, of course).

And New Republican, David Frum's, wife, Danielle Crittenden, made a name for herself telling society that women should have to sexually submit to their husbands. This is the sort of society many New Conservatives have long sought for Canadian women. So I find it a bit disingenuous that New Conservatives are flapping their arms about the same devolution of women's rights they've espoused here, happening in Afghanistan.

The difference is the wording.

If the Christian right are all about making baby after baby, one can assume that involves a lot of sex that the nursing wives and mothers may not be up for. We don't call that rape because it happens here, in North America.

But really, what's the difference between husbands having the right to force their wives to have sex, and women being told that God wants them to have sex even if they don't want it?

I'm curious why there's so much outrage in the New Conservative ranks about Karzai's cave-in (haha - unintentional pun!) to the whoevers of the Islamic militants in Afghanistan re wives having to sexually submit to their husbands. I mean, that's long been a hobby horse of R.E.A.L. Women (which has nothing to do with women and everything to do with Conservatism, of course).

And New Republican, David Frum's, wife, Danielle Crittenden, made a name for herself telling society that women should have to sexually submit to their husbands. This is the sort of society many New Conservatives have long sought for Canadian women. So I find it a bit disingenuous that New Conservatives are flapping their arms about the same devolution of women's rights they've espoused here, happening in Afghanistan.

Comments

[The Stygian and his Shemitish Dogs]

I'm afraid it really won't do. Your frantic attempts to equate organisations such as REAL Women with proponents of Sharia law recall Western "peace"niks equating the records of NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the 1980's, which often approached the level of treason and sabotage when translated into action.

Can you cite examples of REAL women or any similar organisation in the West supporting at least one of a) polygamy b) burqas c) genital mutilation d) child brides?

Bountiful doesn't count.

[Rupert]

There's a difference between the practices of backward-looking religious sects -- which are often blatantly discriminatory -- and the enshrining of those practices in national laws, particularly when those laws target a minority for special and unfavourable treatment. One is a regrettable fact of life; the other is an abomination. Let's also remember that Marx, in one of his more lucid moments, warned us against revisionism. Don't try to judge the past in terms of the present, or use the past as justification for the present. It wasn't that long ago that southern mobs were lynching "n*****s" for minor transgressions. What shall we make of that?