The most horrible name you can think of

Warning: In the part of this post that discusses sexual assault, which may be triggering for some readers, I use gendered language. In referring to rapists as "he" etc., I do not mean to convey that I think all rapes ever committed were committed by men. I do mean to comport with the statistically accurate assumption that a given rapist will be male.

Whom do you think of when you think of a racist? A Klansman? Someone who lynches people of color or keeps them from voting? It seems that many people I'm talking to lately have a very hard-line definition of a racist, a definition which describes a despicable person, someone to be reviled.

Whom do you think of when you think of a rapist? Are you the priveleged person who thinks of a rapist in the abstract, or are you one of millions of people who can picture a face when you read the word "rapist"? Do you think rapists are evil, sociopathic men who prey upon women or children, people so depraved that you have nothing in common with them?

Absolute definitions for people who commit terrible acts or hold harmful views can be comforting, but they are ultimately harmful. In the case of racism, for instance, if you think a racist kills people of color here are some things that might not seem racist to you:

1. Sending an email of the White House lawn filled with watermelons.
2. Saying some members of a certain racial group are "just better/worse at cleaning or watching kids or certain sports or gardening" than members of other racial groups.
3. Including Asian-American actors in movies, but only if there's a "reason" for them to be Asian. You know, like they're computer scientists or ninjas! This works for other races, too. This also works for movies in which people of color only appear as facilitators for the white characters, suggesting that their lives and life stories are less important than those of the white main characters.
4. Taking for granted that mass media, in advertising, television, and movies, reflects your *white* race almost universally, and not thinking of that as different than the world you live in.
5. Making evolution-based arguments for a thin, white, fair-haired beauty ideal in Western culture, as if all men who desire any woman who does not measure up to that ideal has been obliged to ignore his biologically determined (can't control or change it!) desire for white blondeness.
6. Not noticing that throughout the world fairer, paler, whiter people of all races are overwhelmingly members of the upper classes, while darker complected people are members of the lower classes. Or, if you notice, not even considering that to be the product of systemic racism.

There are others. All of these things reflect a preference in the world for whiteness over black- or brown-ness. Contributing to this structure without questioning it is racist, because the structure is racist. It's called living with "unexamined white privilege", and you can do something about it if you want to. You can have racist views without wanting to kill people who are a different color than you. But, the definition of a racist as a cartoonishly villanous Klansman-type character lets many people off the hook in their own minds for their racism and unexamined privilege. This works in rape, too. Check it out.

In the wake of the Roman Polanski arrest and subsequent flood of apologists, Chris Rock went on the Jay Leno show and reminded us: "Rape is #2! Behind murder! It's the second-worst!" While it is true that rape is horrible, public perception of rapists is similarly horrible. This doesn't really work how you'd expect it to, unfortunately. You'd think that when any heretofore good guy that you know who commits rape, he is no longer considered a good guy. Instead, people rush to defend him: he's a good person, he respects [x] and [x] is a woman, he helped an old lady across the street one time etc. etc. This is particularly insidious when you consider the ways the justice system makes it hard for women to report rape, and for laywers to prosecute rape. There's pressure on a woman alleging rape to drop the charges, lest the investigation into a crime committed against her ruin her rapist's reputation.

I submit the much more nuanced, ugly, and uncomfortable truth: if it were easy to recognize a rapist, fewer rapes would occur. We know that most rapes are committed by non-strangers, a.k.a. acquaintances, partners, co-workers, boyfriends, husbands, fellow soldiers. The idea that a woman can avoid every potential rapist in her sphere is, unfortunately, impossible. It is quite likely you have met a man who has raped someone, and you'd never know it unless you knew it! Think about that. There are people you have met who have sexually assaulted people. People who you and/or the greater society consider "good people" rape other people. Stop apologizing for them just because you like their movies or you had fun drinking with them that one time!

Update: great post on this issue on The Sexist:

The Brothers Karzai: What are we really doing in Afghanistan?

Reports surfaced a couple weeks ago that the CIA is paying Ahmed Wali Karzai, Hamid Karzai's brother. So this means:

1) The CIA pays A. Karzai.
2) Karzai ALLEGEDLY uses this money in his ALLEGED role as a major player in Afghanistan's opium trade.
3) The opium trade supplies the Taliban.
4) The Taliban kills Americans.

The options are that the generals who want us to increase troops in Afghanistan didn't know that the CIA is pouring money into that country, or they did know. I don't know which would be worse.

Iran and Afghanistan: Contrasts in Securing Power

In Iran, Ahmadinejad is apparently set to nominate three women to the Iranian cabinet. The AP reports that these nominations appear "to be an attempt by Ahmadinejad to win the support of Iranian women as he fends off opposition claims that his re-election to the presidency in June was fraudulent." These would be the first female ministers Iran has had since the 1970's.

Iran, then, provides an example of a leader making concessions to vocal groups in order to safeguard his power. Women were a vocal and visible part of the uprising in Iran, and so Ahmadinejad is throwing them a bone by including women in his cabinet.

I contrast this with Afghanistan, where, as discussed in the previous post, Karzai is capitulating to fundamentalist voices by quietly passing a law that allows husbands to withhold food from wives who refuse to have sex with them, among other things. Rather than kill a law that would legalize marital rape, which caused international outcry in March, Karzai mollified outsiders and then passed the current law, which undermines women's rights to a similar degree.

The question I have is: why? Why does the regime in Afghanistan, which Americans put in place and have supported for 8 years, still need to placate warlords by stripping women of their rights? Why can Iran, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, tolerate more legal protection for women than Afghanistan? Why did the US even throw the Taliban regime out of Afghanistan if the US-supported regime would be similarly offensive to international standards of human rights?

WTF is THIS?!?!?

Remember in April when there was international outcry about a law that legalized marital rape in Afghanistan? Remember how the president we support, Hamid Karzai, promised to fix it? Well, in Karzai's world I guess "fix it" means "implement it" because looky here. From the article:

The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying "blood money" to a girl who was injured when he raped her.

With this law, Karzai is doing what other power hungry leaders in the region have done for years: sold out progressive principles, even when those are enshrined in the country's constitution, in order to cement their influence over local clerics and warlords. Afghanistan's constitution of 2004 promotes women's rights. You can read a nice breakdown of the constitution by Prof. Madhavi Sunder here.

Democracy cannot exist without the rule of law and the participation of a meaningful percentage of a country's population. The rule of law means that, to some extent, duress and fraud are not the primary means of making someone do something; that, to some extent, people abide by the laws the government sets out for them. People are more likely to do that when the laws are legitimate, according to the allocation of rights set up in that country's constitution. Constitutions are like compacts: the government lists the rights it has over the people and the people's representatives list the rights that the people reserve for themselves.

In Afghanistan, the rights of the people included rights for female people. When it made its constitution, Afghanistan elected to allow the International Human Rights Commission to enforce the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW prohibits sex discrimination in both public and private realms. So, a law that allows a husband to withhold basic necessities like food from his wife if she won't have sex with him clearly enshrines sex discrimination into the laws of Afghanistan, which is unconstitutional. Patently unconstitutional laws like this undermine the rule of law profoundly.

Secondly, democracies in their modern form require a meaningful percentage of the population to participate. It's true that in Athens, a democracy could include only upper class men, but I'd like to think that we have a different view of human beings' worth than they did in ancient times. How can you have a functioning democracy when the government allows half the country's population to be abused? Women in Afghanistan can vote, but they can't leave the house without their husbands' permission according to this new law. That is an unsustainable faux-democracy, inspired by the desire to capitulate to fundamentalists and warlords. WTF is this?!?!?!

Thoughts on Iran

I've been watching eagerly as the events unfold in Iran between long bouts of studying for the bar. Here are some quick hits of my reactions:

• Those who want Obama to come out strongly in favor of those who want democracy in Iran confuse me. Iranians are doing this for themselves. Institutional support from the American president is problematic for two reasons. First, overt support from the American government will make the revolution, which belongs to the Iranians, seem less valid in the Muslim world. It could begin to seem like the product of Western influence rather than the product of the Iranian public's outrage over their election. Now, I agree that on a personal level, people from all over the world should support Iranian revolutionaries if they feel called to do so. This method of support is different because it is bottom-up. Grassroots support can bolster a grassroots uprising, where an official Obama-led statement of support for grassroots uprising in Iran could turn it into a fight about imperialism between the US and Iran. Second reason I think the US government should stay out of it is because Iran is not our business. We need to break out of the idea that everyone in the world is waiting to hear what the US thinks of them. They aren't. Look how the revolution has progressed without a statement from Obama. Somehow, people are moved to fight for a legitimate government without the US suggesting it. The only true democracy, the kind that is precious and self-sustaining, is the kind that people want so badly that they will make it happen by any means necessary. Institutional support from the US is misused when it puts the stamp of approval on a movement that has not one thing to do with us.
• Women. Iranian women that are being photographed in the streets, holding up signs, are rocking my world right now. These university-age women, with scarves drooping precipitously from their heads, looking angrily into the crowds, clutching signs with long, painted fingernails, are the face of rebellion. You realize nail polish is illegal in Iran, right? And now the woman they call Neda is a symbol of the protest. This is really amazing in a country that has tried so hard to repress everyone, including women.
  

Thoughts on American Political Parties

I think that instead of rebuilding the Republican party, a new party should emerge from the left. The Republican Party seems to be a party that values paying a lot for national defense, favors very little governmental regulation of financial markets, and coddles bigots (sorry, "values voters"). Once you take away the bigotry and anti-woman posing, there is nothing unique about the Republican Party's arguments, and the new faces of the Republican Party, like Meghan McCain, have advocated toning down the anti-gay and anti-abortion rhetoric. Without that, there's really nothing different between the two parties. Both favor proportionately big defense spending and a combination of free market principles and governmental regulation.

The world has seen the problems with an unregulated financial sector, and we must re-regulate our markets if we want to remain a robust global trading partner. There is no way that Europe and Asia will trade with us and intertwine their markets with ours if we don't fix the lack of regulations that led to undercapitalized banks, toxic assets, and "too big to fail". Free market capitalism isn't a real argument anymore; there is just a discussion about how much regulation the market can tolerate, and Obama has espoused his confidence in the free market and his desire to let it work as much as possible. This is also true on the health care side: Obama does not advocate for a single-payer system to replace our current non-system. Instead, he offers a plan that creates a government system that will compete with the insurance industry's plans for American's dollars. Obama has increased defense spending and seems to be expanding our military's presence in AfPak, which will finance the work of defense contractors for years.

On the social issues: they're dying. Young people are less religious and also less likely to oppose gay marriage than any previous generation. Birth control is commonplace (though not commonplace enough). Almost nobody abstains from sex until marriage, and cohabitation rates are up. The Right has lost the culture war it waged. Meanwhile, Obama hasn't yet repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell, Barkey Frank stripped EDNA of any reference to employment discrimination protection for transgendered persons, and nobody has suggested the Full Faith and Credit problems with the Federal Defense of Marriage Act. Essentially, DOMA says that no state needs to recognize a gay marriage that occurred in any other state. However, the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution says that states have to respect the "public acts, records, and judicial rulings" of other states. DOMA is patently unconstitutional. Obama is not a radical. He doesn't even favor same sex marriage. His stance is slow-moving and moderate on social issues, no matter what the abstinence-funding, purity-ball-attending, gay-bashing crowd thinks.

Obama's presidency is moderate, with respect to social issues as well as policy. Clinton's was, too. A Progressive/Socialist party that advocates governmental interaction with the market on a much larger scale would provide a meaningful alternative to this Democratic party, one that respects market freedom as well as regulation. The real questions that remain are on the Left: debates over legalization of marijuana and perhaps other drugs, birth control pills available over-the-counter, vastly expanded infrastructure spending, low defense spending and a non-agressive foreign policy, federal regulation of the market on a scale heretofore reserved for the dreaded France (be afraid!), the expansion of the welfare state in an attempt to level out the class system and eradicate poverty, socialized medicine, gay marriage at the federal level, and a provision prohibiting discrimination based on LGB and also T status in employment and housing.

We need voices to the left of the Democratic Party's current incarnation to help implement a truly progressive agenda and to give people who oppose GOP bigotry and big guns a real choice about how far left they wish to go. This country desparately needs to give voters more choices than two! We are multicultural, multilingual, and multiracial. We have different sexual orientations and different concepts of family. We are Americans, and our political discourse must expand.

Death Penalty: Delara Darabi

Delara Darabi, a 23-year-old Iranian woman, was executed Friday. She had confessed to a murder when she was 17, but later recanted. She said that her boyfriend, who was 19 at the time, had convinced her to confess. They thought that she wouldn't be executed, since she was a minor. He is currently serving 10 years for his part in the murder. She was executed alone; neither her family nor her lawyer were informed, although notifying them is her right per Iraqi law.

Is executing juvenile offenders ever right? This is a separate question to whether the death penalty is ever right, I think; does the government have a greater obligation to give juvenlies a second chance than it does to extend the same to adults? If the government structures its laws around the idea that minors and children cannot be held to the same expectations of impulse control and decisonmaking skills that society expects of adults, then yes. A government that does not recognize a minor as a full adult cannot justly punish a minor when she fails to act with the good judgment required of a full adult.

Some critics might contend that 17 and 18 years of age are not meaningfully different in terms of developmental ability. That might be true, and surely it varies among people. However, once the government has decided that 18 years of age is a meaningful proxy for good decisionmaking and sufficient life experience, the government is bound by that proxy. 17 is different than 18, even when it's not, because the government says so. Therefore the government can't justly expect a certain level of responsibility from 17 year olds in all but one context, when that single outlier context is the one in which the government intrudes upon the very life of that person. It is impermissible for the government's inconsistency to result in the ultimate imposition of the state upon the citizen.

This line of analysis might also be meaningful in a women's right context, especially in a legal system that singles women out as dependents of men. In Iran several laws require that men act as providers and represetatives for women: women can't get a passport without their husbands' permission,

they are barred from certain professions, and a woman's life is considered to be worth half of a man's life. These laws suggest that a woman cannot take care of herself. She is inferior in every way to a man, lacking self-control and the ability to function in the world. Any legitimate government, in refusing to confer upon a segment of society the rights and responsibilities of its fully-functioning members, must similarly refuse to punish that segment for failing to exhibit those rights and responsibilities. In other words, in a legitimate society, the government can't have it both ways: either I'm an adult with full rights and control over my actions, and therefore culpable for my sins, or I'm not, and I'm not.

Iran executes more juveniles than any other country, even though it has joined the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits executing people whose crime was committed before their eighteenth birthday.

So let's turn to a free society, for comparison. In the US, we executed juvelines in 19 states until 2005. We executed those with mental impairments until 2002.

Afghanistan Update

Karzai is going to reverse the law legalizing marital rape and rolling back the rights of Afghan women.

Good job, internal and external outrage!

Isolating out the misogyny.

Ok this post is a little different: it's not about the Muslim world. It is inspired by McCain's former campaign manager's comments about gay marriage. It made me think about the unifying ability of culture war issues like gay marriage and abortion, and what unifies the GOP without those issues. I don't think, tea parties notwithstanding, that a philosophy of low taxes and little government intrusion is actually the foundation of the GOP. In reality, many doctrinaire Regan-type Republicans are ok with taxes that enable defense spending, and many religious Republicans are ok with government intrusion, as long as it focuses on private intimate conduct and not on regulation of capital markets. I want to explore, in this post, how some coalitions built on culture war issues are made up of groups that should not agree, even when taking into account ugly and irrational positions. The anti-birth control AND anti-abortion stance is one such coalition. People who believe that birth control availability and a right to abortion ought not to be legal must take that stance because they want to punish women who have sex or else because their religion mandates that stance. Neither of these reasons is an acceptable rationale upon which to make national policy.

The forced-birth crowd, aka anti-abortion, anti-sex education AND anti-birth control people, care only about control of women and not about anything else. Disclaimer: I am making these arguments from a disgusting starting point; I do not accept their premises (for example I don't believe that non-white people are inferior to white people).

White racists and people who hate or resent the poor should be pro government-funded birth control and pro abortion. Poor people are disproportionally non-white. Poor people have the most to gain from government funded programs. So, the government would be funding the birth control that helps to prevent people of color from reproducing. Safe, legal abortion would be available as a backup in case pregnancy is unintended and/or the product of sexual assault (and sexual assault is disproportionately common in communities of color.)

Providing birth control is better than just telling poor people and people of color not to have sex since 1) obviously that doesn't work and 2) it's easier just to give people birth control and not have to try to enforce abstinence. Abstinence education costs a lot of money, though I don't know how much in relation to providing birth control costs. However, I'd be surprised if the decrease in unwanted pregnancies didn't save the government money on emergency room trips for uninsured mothers and early-childhood education and health care.

The third reason to give birth control rather than to just tell people of color and poor people not to have sex requires a bit of intellectual honesty on the part of racists, which I know is a tall order. Bear with me: if you are a racist, you think brown people aren't as good as you, a white person. You think they're not as smart, don't make good decisions, lack discipline or fortitude, and aren't as worthy of human rights. This line of thought presupposes that human rights can be deserved, instead of inherent, but that's another post. Anyway, if you really believe people of color don't make good decisions or lack discipline, then why would you expect them to think: "I can't afford a baby, I better suppress my biological urges all the time so I don't get pregnant". That would take good decision-making skills and discipline! If you're a racist, you can't really hope that non-white people acquire discipline or decision-making skills or those good things you think they lack. If they did, that would totally disrupt your white supremacist hierarchy, leaving you without the white privilege that you depend on for your self-esteem. So, if they lack decision-making skills and discipline and those cannot be acquired, you could just make birth control available and then those problems go away.

Those who think that American-style capitalism is the only acceptable model should be on board with America promoting widespread birth control and abortion rights overseas. During the communist era, the US policy abroad was to encourage population control with the use of contraception, in order to maintain capitalism's hegemony by crippling the growth of communist countries. Michelle Goldberg's book, The Means of Reproduction, examines this history. People who work from a colonialist model and wish to guarantee American economic hegemony rather than a cooperative global economy should like the idea of encouraging small family size and widespread use of birth control in the developing world.

People who believe single mothers are irresponsible and bad parents should be in favor of birth control and abortion. The 80's version of single-mother hate came from Reagan's phrase "welfare queen". When people describe single mothers, the stigmatizing effect of the phrase "welfare queen" is still evident. It is present in allegations that single mothers raise kids on food stamps and welfare, and single mothers' kids go to prison. If women had unfettered access to their reproductive rights, we could address this problem, if it is a problem, and if it can be addressed. We would be able to isolate the cases, which I contend would be rare, where women choose to have babies they cannot afford. Why not just tell women not to have sex instead? Because 1) it hasn't worked yet and 2) if you believe single mothers are irresponsible, undisciplined people, then you shouldn't be comfortable banking on their ability to abstain.

And, finally, people who hate abortion should support widespread birth control availability, since it will decrease the abortion rate. I promise, when faced with a low-cost ex-ante method of avoiding unintended pregnancy, women will use that option. Mistakes will be made, but that doesn't mean women aren't rational actors.

Without misogyny, racists, poor-haters, and single-mom haters would be on board with widespread subsidized or free birth control and abortion. I recognize there's a small wrinkle with the people who believe abortion is murder, but we're talking about the disingenuous wingnuts who want to outlaw birth control AND abortion, making family planning and reproductive control a thing of the past. For these people, the problem with birth control is that it takes away reasons not to have sex, and they reject any model in which a woman's sexuality is under her own control. They would rather tell people not to have sex than make it possible for people to engage in sex without the threat of pregnancy. They think sex has consequences. Only bad things have consequences! Good things have "benefits" and morally neutral things have "results". Sex is good. It is an inevitable part of the human experience. It is fun, and free, and it feels good. Why should I refuse to engage in a perfectly healthy, legal, normal activity that I want to do just because a person I have never met says I should?

Sounds like I am saying they hate sex, not that they hate women. Let me be clear: they do hate sex. However, look who absorbs the costs of sex in a world where birth control is not completely avilable: the woman. Look who should have been more careful or worn something different or sent different signals when a rape occurs: the woman. Look who has to "take responsibility" for having sex by carrying a life she didn't intend to create: the woman. If anti-birth control and anti-abortion people hate sex and their perfect model gives women all the resposibility for the costs of sex, that's misogyny. And, without misogyny, the pro-choice movement would have strange allies in the racist, poor-hater communities. I argue that's a good thing because I believe, when it come to keeping women alive and in control of their own bodies, the ends justify the means.

The abortion issue-as-litmus-test is just one situation in which I see the facade of a unified GOP cracking. People inside and outside the party need to regard so-called Republican core issues with a critical eye: to which faction within the GOP is this issue important? Why? How does it relate to the national platform? For example, the more libertarian wing of the party cannot possibly believe that taxes are an affront but interfering in female citizens' bodily integrity is not.

Entitlement and Marital Rape

Sarah Palin's pick for Attorney General of Alaska is running into some problems. A letter by Leah Burton, reproduced here and here, says that Wayne Anthony Ross spoke at a 1991 meeting of the group Dads Against Discrimination. Burton's letter alleges that Ross said, "If a guy can't rape his wife, who's he gonna rape?" I have several things to say about this statement in isolation, not as an indicator of Ross' potential job performance as AG. It hasn't been proven that he said this yet.

1. This statement might mean, "If a man can't rape his wife, he will inevitably go rape someone else, and that's not good." I would take issue with the idea that a man is inevitably a rapist. Even if this statement doesn't mean that all men are rapists, it might mean that those men who are rapists should confine their activities to one victim. I disagree that it's helpful to the world to assign one woman to absorb the pain of all potential victims. If a wife is made into the mechanism by which society controls rapists, then society completely ignores any punishment or accountability for rapists themselves. How about wives don't have to be victims of sexual assault at all, because men realize that women's bodies should be under individual women's control?
2. The more conventional way to read this statement is "If a man can't rape his wife, then what is a wife for?" This view is akin to the idea that marital rape doesn't exist, because "rape" means "have sex with someone without their permission" and wives, through their marriage vows, give their husbands blanket sexual consent until the marriage ends or one spouse dies. This view depends on the idea that women are not people with full agency within marriage, and that their bodily integrity is secondary to their husbands' sexual desires.
   

The statement attributed to Ross led me to revisit Afghan leader Mohammad Asif Mohseni's statements about the law that grants a husband sexual access to his wife every fourth night. The Globe and Mail reported this story and Mr. Mohseni's statements:

“If she is not sick, and if she does not have another problem, it is the right of a man to ask for sex and she should make herself ready for it. This is the right of a man,” Mr. Mohseni explained.

Mr. Mohseni argued that women and men are very far from equal in today's Afghanistan and should not be treated as such. He pointed out that many rural women are illiterate and would not be able to find work if they were asked to provide some of the family's financial support. Men are typically the breadwinners in Afghan households, expected to provide for their wives and children.

“It is not possible for all women to pay the same amount of money as men are paying. For all these expenses, can't we at least give the right to a husband to demand sex from his wife after four nights?” he said.

Look at the similarity in the worldview of a person who would say what Ross is alleged to have said and someone who advocates legal marital rape. Both view sex as a commodity: something that women give and men take. Neither view women as owners of their sexuality. Rather, both seem to believe that a woman's husband owns her body for the purpose of satisfying his sexual pleasure. Neither discuss the ramifications of forced sexual intercourse on family dynamics or women's physical and emotional well-being. Neither address any non-illness-related reason a woman might legitimately withold consent from her husband, and indeed the decision over whether the reason is worthy isn't mentioned in Ross' statement and is entirely within the law's power (and not the woman's) in Mohseni.

American culture is called "rape culture" by feminists because of statements like the one Ross is alleged to have made. However, somehow we hold ourselves apart from Muslim governments, believing the US to be much more progressive and enlightened. However, our cultures are more similar than many in the West would like to admit, the difference is a matter of degree within the same basic model. Any society that works within the concept of "giving" women rights ignores the fact that women, as humans, are born with rights that nobody has the power to give or take away. If a society keeps women from acting on their own behalf and representing themselves in government and exercising bodily control and sexual agency, that society denies women's humanity.

Marital Rape in Afghanistan

I wanted to address the Afghan law that many liberal and feminist bloggers have spoken about, which guarantees a man's right of sexual access to his wife. Under the law, a man has a right to have sex with his wife every fourth night (which I assume is a minimum). One of the law's drafters, Mohammad Asif Mohseni, has condemned the outcry from Western leaders (including Obama), saying that if the West wants a democracy in Afghanistan, then it needs to let the Afghan people pass laws like this, if the people decide they are necessary.

Mohseni's underlying argument boils down to "Western influence over our laws is unacceptable". This view seems to be shared by Noah Feldman, as described in his article Imposed Constitutionalism (37 Conn. L. Rev. 857, 869 (2005)). To thse who think Westerners should have little or no say in Afghanistan's laws, I must ask: are you serious? How can the West avoid interfering with Afghanistan's legal system? The US was attacked by the Taliban, which was effectively running Afghanistan, since its government was broken. As a response to a devastating attack, we invaded Afghanistan. The logical conclusion of that invasion, whenever it may come, must include a new, stable Afghan government, with American support. And, we as Americans have an obligation, having taken on the burden of invading and trying to stabilize the Afghan state, to safeguard human rights there.

Avoiding Western intrusion into Afghan affairs is impossible in 2009. In fact, an American refusal to get involved with this particular law would be a Western interference that comes down on the side of men who think women exist to be used for sex. There is no neutral, non-invasive ground for the US or the rest of the West in this situation. By standing idly by, Westerners are complicit in deprivation of Afghan women's constitutionally protected rights. We are complicit in the legalization of marital rape and the statutory reduction of women to sex objects rather than people. We ruin our own strategic objectives if we don't push back, because we contribute to the instability of the Afghan state when we support fundamentalists like Mohseni. When fundamentalists and regional clerics are given power over government and the laws thereof, they will not back off and support whatever government we pick to nominally run the country. Giving fundamentalist warlords an inch on these types of debates silences women and legitimizes virulent fundamentalism that reads no human rights guarantees in the Quran.

Mohseni contends that marital rape and women's sexual availability to their husbands is a Quranic principle, and is therefore beyond analysis and reproach:

Afghanistan is an Islamic state and its constitution defers to the Quran as the ultimate authority. Mr. Mohseni said the law simply reiterates rules from Islam's holy book.

The Quran, like every other authoritative religious text, is open to interpretation. Does the Bible say things that were only culturally appropriate in the context (temporal and cultural) in which it was written? You bet. Does the Torah? Sure. It is an indefensible position that the Quran, in 2009, necessarily restricts human rights and mandates that women function as objects of sexual gratification for their husbands regardless of their own feelings on the matter. There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world (according to some sources). Not all of them practice or interpret their religion in the same way. It is unnecessary and inappropriate for the US to entertain arguments that the Quran mandates that women are their husband's property, or any argument that similarly reduces women's humanity. To accept such an argument is to support a hard line, fundamentalist interpretation rather than a more progressive, democratic interpretation. There is no reason to accept any interpretation of Islam that doesn't comport with modern understandings of human rights.

Our failure to insist upon a liberal interpretation of Islam in the laws of the Muslim governments we influence will doom our goals in Iraq ad Afghanistan by empowering fundamentalists there. Such a failure would also doom our efforts to achieve democracy in those countries, since it is disingenuous to describe a state as a democracy if it lacks meaningful participation by its women.

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Family Law/Property Law

I'm adopting a new goal to post once per week, on Thursdays or Fridays. But so that I don't lose it, I wanted to talk about an idea I've been ruminating for a while: family law has its origins in property law. In order to flesh this out, I will need to figure out when property law as we understand it came into being and for whom. As for the Western world and the Anglo-American legal tradition, I know that all real property in England ultimately belonged to the crown. What about personal property? What regulations were there over a man regarding his livestock, and how were they different from regulations pertaining to women and children? Is the Bible helpful in understanding this question?

Same questions go for the Middle East. How did property law evolve there? When did a separate family law jurisprudence emerge, and was it part of church or secular adjudication? Is the Quran helpful in understanding this question as it pertains to the Middle East?

I work from a place of curiosity and deep offense with this question. The idea that I am less than a man because I am a woman has always been quite unpalatable to me. Knowing that women in different times or places literally had no human rights and were completely dependent on their fathers and husbands is hard to wrap my mind around. The very idea that my birth as female dooms me to different treatment for life is shocking and maddening. This is why my feminism gave rise to intersectional progressive values and secular humanism: I reject white, able-bodied men as the "default"of humanity. This world does not belong to one subset of its inhabitants.

How did this devaluation of women begin? Women's physical power to create life must have seemed divine in early humanity: goddess worship was most likely, quite common. I had a thought the other day that perhaps death in childbirth contributed to the devaluation of women. It seems inefficient today to keep half the world's population illiterate and weak. Maybe during most of human history, when women were married and pregnant in their teens and deaths in childbirth were frequent, educating women, or indeed becoming attached emotionally to them, must have seemed like a waste of time. Maybe our biology reduced us to death before the patriarchy reduced us to our biology.

Availability and Consent

I haven't posted in a long time. But I'm back.

I'm thinking about the perception that a woman is sexually available. It seems to me, and it is corroborated by the Yes Means Yes blog and the book that share its name, that women who talk frankly about sex are labeled as not only "sexually available", but "sexually available to me" by the listener.

This makes me consider Egypt, where women report widespread sexual harassment, and are cautioned to veil themselves to prevent against groping and catcalls. 

The culture and mores of the Western world are different from those of Egypt, and other Muslim majority countries, but the message is the same to all the world's women: if you express your agency, you will be termed "available". If you are sexually available, you will be harassed. The problem with this narrative is the blame it puts on women for being participants in their own society, and the absolution men can find in the silence: where is the expectation for men to respect boundaries and behave appropriately among the warnings aimed at women?