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Category: Marriage

Saudi Cleric Defends Marriage of Preteen Girls

In defending the decision to refuse an annulment for the marriage of an 8-year-old girl to a 47-year-old man, Saudi Arabia’s top cleric had this to say:

“It is incorrect to say that it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger,” Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, the kingdom’s grand mufti, said in remarks quoted Wednesday in the regional Al-Hayat newspaper. “A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she’s too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her.”

Indeed, how dare we assume that preteens don’t want to be sold and raped?

Some more back-story on this case:

In December, Saudi judge Sheikh Habib Abdallah al-Habib refused to annul the marriage of an 8-year-old girl to a 47-year-old man.

The judge rejected a petition from the girl’s mother, whose lawyer said the marriage was arranged by her father to settle a debt with “a close friend.” The judge required the girl’s husband to sign a pledge that he would not have sex with her until she reaches puberty.

Two things immediately come to mind:

First, puberty really may not be so far off for this little girl.  I, for example, developed breast buds around age 10, got my period by age 11, and was easily what you’d call sexually developed on a physical level (and being propositioned by grown men) by age 12.  I’ve heard stories of girls reaching puberty significantly younger than that, as well — and so even if we were for some ludicrous reason to put aside the question of whether meaningful consent is ever really possible in a situation where a girl is sold to a man at age 8, it seems strange to me that raping a girl at age 12 because she has hit puberty is considered to be incredibly better than raping her when she’s 8.  Well, okay, not “strange” — more like classic rape culture in action. Because if she looks like a grown woman, she must be able to consent (and therefore must consent), right?

Secondly, maybe, just maybe, if you need to require a man to sign a pledge saying that he won’t rape his child bride because she’s hasn’t even reached puberty — and just assume that he’ll keep it, no less — there’s a problem with allowing that marriage to go forward to begin with.

Al-Sheikh continued:

Al-Sheikh was asked during a lecture Monday about parents forcing their underage daughters to marry.

“We hear a lot in the media about the marriage of underage girls,” he said, according to the newspaper. “We should know that Shariah law has not brought injustice to women.”

Which is undoubtedly why the girl’s wishes and her mother’s word don’t matter one bit. And why other Saudi women are really pissed off and speaking out:

Wajeha al-Huwaider, co-founder of the Society of Defending Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia, told CNN in December that achieving human rights in the kingdom means standing against those who want to “keep us backward and in the Dark Ages.”

She said the marriages cause girls to “lose their sense of security and safety. Also, it destroys their feeling of being loved and nurtured. It causes them a lifetime of psychological problems and severe depression.”

But hey, who cares what those uppity women think?  Clearly, not this guy.

Sometimes, there are no words for situations so horrific.

File under “God I hate people today.”

“Man accused of selling daughter for cash, beer.” Yes, that’s actually the headline.

GREENFIELD, Calif. (AP) — Police have arrested a Greenfield man for allegedly arranging to sell his 14-year-old daughter into marriage in exchange for $16,000, 100 cases of beer and several cases of meat.

Police said they only learned of the deal after the 36-year-old man went to them to get his daughter back because payment wasn’t made as promised. The man was arrested Sunday on suspicion of human trafficking.

Officers also arrested an 18-year-old man on suspicion of statutory rape. Investigators believe the girl went willingly with the man, but she’s under California’s legal age of consent and can’t legally marry.

Police say arranged marriages involving underage girls have become a problem in this small Central Coast farming community.

Maybe the father can defend himself in court by arguing that he’s simply a proponent of traditional marriage.

Reconsidering the Black Single Mother Argument

A great essay on what is really at the center of hatred directed toward black single mothers, single mothers in general, and other non-nuclear families, by BlackScientist, especially with arguments like this one threatening to break into the media narrative again:

I want to point out that nuclear black families do exist, and have in the past, alongside other family arrangements. Before Moynihan declared in 1965 that the problem with black america was that “nearly one-quarter of negro births are… illegitimate,” and “almost one-fourth of negro families are headed by females,” 74 percent of all black families were maintained by a husband and wife, and 22 percent were headed by women. Interestingly, by 1982, almost two decades after the implementation of policy that followed his report, black families maintained by married couples had dropped down to 55 percent, and single mother households rose to 41 percent.

The principal problem with the argument that intergenerational crime and poverty are due to the prevalence of single black mother households (aside from its sexist undertones) is that it centers blame on the family structure itself — which is queer — as opposed to the state-sponsored hostility that incriminates that family structure and makes it so difficult for single-mother households to survive. The fact of the matter is, through policy, the nation-state systematically discriminates against single-mother households and other queer domesticities that are not husband-wife-child. There are federal and state policies that not only encourage marriage, but also actively discourage other forms of love and commitment by granting multiple economic and legal privileges to married couples.


You must read the rest.

(via)

Daughter Offered to Iraqi Shoe-Thrower

I’ll be honest and admit that I’m not entirely sure what to say about this, what with the fucked up-ness seeming so obvious. But for the sake of completion, since Feministe did cover the shoe-throwing incident on multiple levels, I felt obligated to put it up.

Last week, an Egyptian man offered his daughter to the Iraqi shoe-thrower Muntazer al-Zaidi.

An Egyptian man said Wednesday he was offering his 20-year-old daughter in marriage to Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush in Baghdad Sunday,

The daughter, Amal Saad Gumaa, said she agreed with the idea. “This is something that would honour me. I would like to live in Iraq, especially if I were attached to this hero,” she told Reuters by telephone.

Her father, Saad Gumaa, said he had called Dergham, Zaidi’s brother, to tell him of the offer. “I find nothing more valuable than my daughter to offer to him, and I am prepared to provide her with everything needed for marriage,” he added.

Aw, look!  See, he thinks is daughter is valuable! Isn’t that sweet?

Uh, yeah, sure it would be, if “value” wasn’t so closely equated with “ownership” — and property is exactly what the daughter is being treated as.  I am not going to get into sticky questions of the woman’s agency if she says that she’s fine with the idea — frankly, I’m shocked that anyone asked for her opinion at all — since we have no way of knowing how she feels other than to ask her, and we have no way of knowing how honest she would be in a public statement to the international press.

What we can say is that with her father doing the offering, with her permission and blessing or not, she’s sure as hell not being treated like she has any agency.  So let it suffice for me to loosely quote Haley, of Egyptian background herself, from the email she sent me with the link for this story: “Yay for women as property!” — not to mention prizes and rewards.

Blaming Gay People For the Loss of Their Own Rights

Rolling Stone finally decided to write an article about the passage of Proposition 8. The subtitle?

Don’t blame Mormons or black voters – the California activists who tried to stop Prop 8 ran a lousy campaign.

But evidence of entrenched homophobia and religious intolerance obscure a more difficult truth. Prop 8 should have been defeated — two months before the election, it was down 17 points in the polls — but the gay-rights groups that tried to stop it ran a lousy campaign. According to veteran political observers, the No on Prop 8 effort was slow to raise money, ran weak and confusing ads, and failed to put together a grass-roots operation to get out the vote.

“This was political malpractice,” says a Democratic consultant who operates at the highest level of California politics. “They fucked this up, and it was painful to watch. They shouldn’t be allowed to pawn this off on the Mormons or anyone else. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and now hundreds of thousands of gay couples are going to pay the price.”

Well, at least they ended up on the right side of the “let’s just blame black people” issue. And yet, they still managed to end up terribly wrong.

Did No on Prop 8 run a crappy campaign? From the looks of the article, yes. They could have done a lot better in terms of leadership, grassroots organizing, advertising, fundraising, and of course reaching out to minority populations. All of this is true.

The article also argues that Yes on 8 ran a campaign of Obamaesque magnitude.  But apparently that doesn’t factor in to the ultimate conclusion.

I’m personally really sick of the idea that the “gay people just didn’t beg enough for their own rights” argument is a brilliant replacement for the racist one above.  Guess what?  If entrenched homophobia (across the board) and religious intolerance was not an issue, the fact that No on 8 ran a shitty campaign wouldn’t have been an issue either.  And saying “well maybe if they’d just asked the nice straight people a bit more pleadingly” is just another example of the privilege and prejudice.

No one should have to beg for their rights.  Period.  And the oppressor is always to blame for the oppression they commit.

While I don’t know the author’s sexual orientation, I do have to emphasize that this is a particulary strong slap in the face coming from a supposedly liberal publication that is aimed directly at a white, straight male audience, has a lead political writer whose favorite insult is “cocksucker” (I’m looking at you, Matt Taibbi), and sure as hell didn’t say a word about Prop 8 to that left-leaning straight audience of theirs (many of whom voted Obama but against gay rights) until it was way too late.  But apparently, like innumerable other commentators, they’re not above parading around with the claim that they could have done it so much better.  If they were the ones oppressed.

At what age did you decide not to be gay?

Jon’s opening comments about how he’s cool with the “pro-life” movement piss me off (as did his Planned Parenthood gift certificate jokes last week), but the rest of it is a good take down that has me cheering.

Really, Huckabee, answer the question. At what age did you decide not to be gay? And assuming for the sake of argument that it was in fact a choice to make, what about it makes you feel like superior human being to all of those who made a different one?

h/t Feministing

California Supreme Court to Review Prop. 8

Let’s hope they go the right way on this.

Opponents of Prop. 8 don’t have a whole lot to lose by bringing this to the court, so I think this was a good (if last-ditch) strategy. What concerns me is the fact that the last decision issued by the California Supreme Court on same-sex marriage was narrowly decided (5-4); the fact that voters willfully took away the rights of their fellow citizens via referendum could be a tipping point for one of the five majority justices.

What concerns me even more is the fact that Prop 8 supporters are threatening the judges with a recall if they don’t rule the way Prop 8 supporters want them to. California Supreme Court judges don’t have lifetime appointments; they’re elected every 12 years (although they run unopposed in retention elections). I have mixed feelings about judicial appointments vs. elections, but the judiciary is designed to be a separate branch of government offering checks to ensure that power isn’t to concentrated in one area, and to provide protection for minority groups and views which otherwise might be run over by the majority. To have their jobs threatened not because they’re incompetent or refusing to apply the law but because they aren’t toeing a specific ideological line is very troubling.

Here’s hoping it works out.

Black Friendly When We Need You

A guest post by Renee

[Note from Jill: Renee sent this to be guest posted more than a week ago. It’s my fault it’s going up late, and I apologize].

You know between the MRA infestation and the blame it on the blacks thing in reference to Prop 8, I have done some thinking. What these two incidents have done is confirm something that I have actually believed for quite some time; blacks are used for the sake of convenience.

When other so-called justice programs needs us, they remind us of the ways in which we are marginalized and attempt to point out that their exclusion is the same. You know what I’m talking about, the “it’s just like Rosa Parks line.” This often makes me want to ask, really are you sure? It seems that white people have a history of knowing what blacks go thorough on a daily basis when it is convenient for them to admit the ways in which they discriminate against POC. When they want something from us, like a vote on a bill, organizing help, or even a gopher to make coffee they suddenly are so understanding of what blacks are dealing with.

The rest of the time we get told about how equal the world is; yes the wonderful post racial world that we have been informed that we are all living in. With the election of Obama we have even been flatly told that we have no excuses left for being at the bottom of the race and class hierarchy. White people have been decent enough to put aside their racial hatred and therefore blacks should just buck up and deal with the high level of incarceration, bad schools, inequity in employment, etc and etc., It’s socially unacceptable to say nigger today, as that is the mark of a bigot; however the other ways in which blacks are disenfranchised are socially deemed a figment of our collective imaginations.

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