December 16, 2018

24 percent of all marriages in Iran are child marriages; why aren't American feminists outraged?

Liberal leaders constantly tell us deplorables "All cultures are equally valid and good."  This means liberals believe that Sharia law--which Muslims seek to impose on everyone, everywhere--is a perfectly good, reasonable system.

If this is indeed the liberal position, I'd like to ask American feminsts for their opinion about something:  What's your stand on Muslim parents forcing 8-year-old girls to marry 40-year-old men?

The following story is from an Iranian by birth.

Noushin is now 19.  At age 8 her parents forced her to marry a 43-year-old "At eight years old my parents sat me down for a serious talk," she says. "I can still remember the tremble in my mother's voice. She told me that in two days I would be part of an Islamic religious blessing. My father insisted that I behave, and not cause a scene. I was confused, but I trusted them...right up to the moment that the ring went onto my finger and I became the bride of a 43 year old man."

"I understood that I was married, but I did not understand what that meant." She said was forced to have sexual intercourse years before reaching puberty. "Each day was filled with new confusion, and new horrors," she said.
"I thought the move to my husband's house was punishment by my parents because I had not listened when they told me to stop playing a week before. I hoped that after that they would bring me back to my parents the next day. But it soon became clear that this was not a temporary punishment, it would last a lifetime."
You might believe that these things happen only rarely, but in fact in Iran today 24 percent of all marriages are child marriages.

In fact, official Iranian statistics show 180,000 child marriages take place there each year. 

Before the Islamist party of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, the legal age of marriage was 18 for girls and 20 for boys. After the mullahs' party imposed Sharia law in Iran and made it the official law of the land, the authorities immediately changed the age of legal marriage to 9 for girls and 13 for boys.  And in 2013 Iran's government passed a law allowing men to marry their adopted daughters.

Seems to me most western women would find the practice of child marriage intolerable--particularly when that's officially approved by a nation's government.  But amazingly, I have yet to hear any feminist organization condemn Sharia-legal child marriage. 

Which strikes me as...odd.

Maybe western feminist organizations have indeed condemned child marriage but the mainstream media just doesn't report it.  But in the Internet age, any press conference anywhere leaves a record in the local media, at least.  The Majors can ignore it but they haven't yet found a way to make posts by small local papers and TV stations vanish.  So if a feminist organization had condemned the Sharia-legal practice of parents forcing 8-year-old girls to marry 43-year-old men, there should be some record of it.

Given the key role of people like Linda Sarsour in the "women's movement" in the U.S, a cynic might suspect that the apparent silence on this issue might be because the leaders of the most vocal American feminist organization have decided it's more beneficial to maintain their alliance with Islamic groups against the eeevil Christian patriarchy. 

Wait, that's just crazy talk.  So no doubt we'll start to see dozens of American feminist groups condemning Sharia-legal child marriage any day now.

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