Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
So let me gets this straight. If this constitution brings peace but women women's rights are restricted then Iraq is worse off than it was under Saddam? That is just absurd.
No one had any rights under Saddam Hussein. So any rights are a step in a positive direction.
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That's not true. Iraq, even under Sadaam, was one of the better places to be a woman in the Middle East. Women could drive, they could go to school, they could work. Sadaam's Iraq was a secular nation, and the Islamic rules regarding women were not the law of the land.
I can't imagine having had rights of equality and then suddenly having them taken away. That's almost worse than not ever having had them in the first place.
ETA:
Article on the erosion of women's rights since the American liberation:
Quote:
Women in Iraq Decry Decision To Curb Rights
Council Backs Islamic Law on Families
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 16, 2004; Page A12
BAGHDAD, Jan. 15 -- For the past four decades, Iraqi women have enjoyed some of the most modern legal protections in the Muslim world, under a civil code that prohibits marriage below the age of 18, arbitrary divorce and male favoritism in child custody and property inheritance disputes.
Saddam Hussein's dictatorship did not touch those rights. But the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council has voted to wipe them out, ordering in late December that family laws shall be "canceled" and such issues placed under the jurisdiction of strict Islamic legal doctrine known as sharia.
This week, outraged Iraqi women -- from judges to cabinet ministers -- denounced the decision in street protests and at conferences, saying it would set back their legal status by centuries and could unleash emotional clashes among various Islamic strains that have differing rules for marriage, divorce and other family issues.
"This will send us home and shut the door, just like what happened to women in Afghanistan," said Amira Hassan Abdullah, a Kurdish lawyer who spoke at a protest meeting Thursday. Some Islamic laws, she noted, allow men to divorce their wives on the spot.
"The old law wasn't perfect, but this one would make Iraq a jungle," she said. "Iraqi women will accept it over their dead bodies."
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But I guess so long as the free market is going, it doesn't matter what happens to the women. Plus, all those 12 year olds can get married now.
