December 5, 2024

Women’s Rights Under Assault in Afghanistan

image Perhaps there is little room for leaders with principles in the new Afghanistan.  After all, Muslim extremists still control significant territory and threaten the would-be civilized regions.  But given everything that America and Britain have poured into the country since pushing the Islamofascist Taliban into the mountains, I would expect more from Hamid Karzai’s government than to cave into the fundamentalists on something so, well, fundamental as a woman’s right to control when she has sex.  Basic as they are, such expectations are apparently for naught in the country western blood built.

Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands’ sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review.

“Tamkeen is the readiness of the wife to submit to her husband’s reasonable sexual enjoyment, and her prohibition from going out of the house, except in extreme circumstances, without her husband’s permission. If any of the above provisions are not followed by the wife she is considered disobedient.”

Evidently in Afghanistan it takes a real man to starve a woman until she’s ready to fuck.  Very impressive.  Disgusting as that sickening provision is, the new “Men are Gods” law is even worse than that.

The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.

In other words, if the beatings and starvation doesn’t work the so-called husband can deny his wife all contact with her own children.  Just one more form of leverage meant to enforce the feeble illusion of virility in the region’s males.

Could this be one of the reasons that women were on the front line of the election protests in Iran?  I wouldn’t doubt it in the least.  The most oppressed value freedom more than anyone else.

marc

Marc is a software developer, writer, and part-time political know-it-all who currently resides in Texas in the good ol' U.S.A.

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