A law that was not too long ago submitted to the Afghan parliament until it was held up has been sent back to parliament with a modification, and it's an ugly one:
The women's rights activist Wazhma Frough, who was involved in the review, said that conservative religious leaders had pressured the Justice Ministry to keep many of the most controversial clauses.
"There have been a few little changes, but they are not enough," she said. "For example, if the wife doesn't accept her husband's sexual requirements then he can deny her food."
According to civil society groups, the law, which regulates the personal affairs of Afghanistan's minority Shia community, still includes clauses which allow rapists to marry their victims as a way of absolving their crime and it tacitly approves child marriage. The law sparked riots in Kabul. Hundreds of Shia women took to the streets in protest. They were attacked by mobs of angry men who launched counter demonstrations outside the capital's largest Shia madrassa.
It's astonishing. It's legislating immorality, cruelty, murder, rape, and all manner of ungood things--and they purport it's for religion's sake.
Bull.
It's about domination of women for convenience's sake. Is it Islam--or is it just barbarity? I'd say the latter. It is beneath a woman's dignity for her to sell herself to her own husband for a meal. It should be beneath the dignity of a man to deny any human being, let alone his wife, the basic need of food, in exchange for gratification of a temporary urge. This law grants an inequality between the sexes--but why? Because it is genuinely believed women exist as objects to be sold into marriage as if slavery to a rapist just so he can be absolved his crime? Because husbands contribute so much more to society by mounting their women, than their women ever could without submission?
It's a shame this is back. It's horribly unjust.
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