Marital Rape is Okay!!! Allah Says So!!!

Boy, it must truly suck to be Hamid Karzai.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, His Islamic Excellency The Honorable Hamid Karzai is the President of The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

On one hand he’s trying to bring his nation out of the Stone Age and at least into being Third World and not Sixth World, but he has to deal with tribes and clans and warlords and an economy based upon the sole cash crop being opium poppies to make heroin, and a society based upon an insanely strict adherence to Islam that keeps his country’s women enslaved and men too afraid to do anything remotely Western or modern so that they may as well still be living in caves as hunter-gatherers looking for a herd of Baluchatherium to spear for dinner. Oh wait, it’s 2009; they’d hunt wooly mammoths with an RPG.

He’s trying to help America fight the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, but he can’t be seen to help too much because if he does he’ll get a truck bomb delivered to his doorstep in the name of Allah and Mohammed his Prophet, blessed be their names, yadda yadda yadda.

And it’s really hard to be taken seriously on the world stage when you have asshats like Mohammad Asif Mohseni making your country and Islam as a whole look like total uncivilized douchebags by publicly supporting a law that critics say legalizes marital rape and rolls back women's rights and who rejected an international outcry as foreign meddling, insisting the law offers women many protections.

The law, passed last month, says a husband can demand sex with his wife every four days unless she is ill or would be harmed by intercourse, and regulates when and for what reasons a wife may leave her home alone. Yeah, Allah forbid that a woman should slip her chains, unhook her collar and leash, and actually go outside. And since when has Islam cared a whit whether a woman was harmed?

"It is essential for the woman to submit to the man's sexual desire," the law says. (By force, I guess.)

The legislation raises again the specter of the militant Taliban regime, which fell in 2001 after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban required women to wear all-covering burkas and banned them from leaving home without a male relative. Of course, that relative might not be the right relative and both might be killed out of hand, depending upon which insane cleric has a bug up his ass that day.

Following an international uproar over the new law President Karzai put it under review. The move puts enforcement on hold, at least until some more car bombs can be built.

Mohammad Asif Mohseni, the aforementioned top Afghan cleric and one of the law's main drafters, said the legislation cannot be revoked or changed because it was enacted through a legislative process — passed by both houses of parliament and signed by Karzai. Oops. Shit, oh dear.

"The Westerners claim that they have brought democracy to Afghanistan. What does democracy mean? It means government by the people for the people. They should let the people use these democratic rights," Mohseni told reporters in the capital, Kabul.

Well, shitfire. Using our own democracy against us. We just got served.

Surrounded by supporters, Mohseni unfurled reams of paper with hundreds of women's signatures and thumbprints backing the law. The legislation came out of three years of debate and revision involving both Islamic scholars and members of parliament, Mohseni said. Most of those thumbprints came from thumbs hacked off of women whose hands were showing from under their burkas, though.

Afghanistan is an Islamic state and its constitution defers to the Koran as the ultimate authority, of course, regardless of what the Western world would prefer. Mohseni said the law simply reiterates rules from Islam's holy book.

"In Shariah law, it states that a woman cannot go out without the permission of her husband," he said. He argued that the law is permissive because it allows a woman to go out for a medical emergency or other urgent reason without asking. She’ll just be beaten or stoned after she gets out of the hospital. But hey, she was allowed to go to the hospital, right? That’s progress!

Mohseni said much of the uproar has come from people misinterpreting the law. He said a woman can refuse sex with her husband for many reasons beyond illness, including fasting for Ramadan, preparing for a pilgrimage, menstruating, or recovering from giving birth. Refusal, however, will result in death, or worse.

Though the law only applies to the country's Shiite population, which is 10 percent to 20 percent of Afghanistan's 30 million people, Mohseni, the country's top Shiite cleric, said most of the articles could also be applied to Sunnis. A prominent Sunni cleric, Mawlawi Habibullah Ahsam, said the rules about women submitting to sex and leaving the home would also be acceptable to Sunnis. Well, holy shit. You mean we finally get Sunni and Shiite Muslims to agree on something besides hating each other and hating Jews and hating us, and it’s to say okay to treating your women as slaves? Yeah, that’s progress, baby!

Dozens of Afghan lawmakers and officials condemned the legislation, saying it encourages re-Talibanization. And then they immediately began fearing for their lives for speaking up.

Much has improved for women since the fall of the Taliban. Millions of girls now attend school, and many women own businesses. Of 351 parliamentarians, 89 are women. But in the conservative country, critics fear those gains could easily be reversed. Of course they can…governmental overthrow is always just a few car bombs away.

Mohseni argued that women and men are very far from equal in today's Afghanistan and should not be treated as such. He said many rural women are illiterate and would not be able to find work. Men are typically expected to provide for their wives and children.

"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.

Dude, the reason women and men aren’t equal is because of people like you who keep them chained up as cattle. They’re illiterate because you Sharia Law dickbags keep them from going to school, or to work, or beyond the 19th century.

Religion of peace…whoo hooo!!!!