Legal Rape in Afghanistan?

Seriously. In a desperate bid for votes the Karzai government in Afghanistan is proposing a law which makes it illegal for women to refuse their husbands sex. Basically the law makes it legal for husbands to rape their wives if they refuse to come across.

Now i’m trained in anthropology – the most culturally sensitive and relativistic discipline of all the social sciences – but i still gotta say: WHAT THE FUCK? i mean, i’m all for ethnic groups retaining their historical beliefs, but Afghanis - we are promised - are supposed to be moving toward a fully functioning democratic polity. Legislating such brutal social practices is not only foolish it is obviously morally bankrupt and completely at odds with basic human rights as supported within our (now) international community.

If the Afghan leadership thinks this is in anyway acceptable in the world we all inhabit together, they are seriously mistaken. International leaders should publicly condemn the Karzai government and begin to move towards severe sanctions. This is a very different world than they think it is, and as HUMANS we cannot allow historical guilt and an academically funded relativistic amorality to get in the way of the advancement of human rights throughout the world.

After Canadian Prime Minister Harper was cajoled by international outrage into making disparaging comments about the notion of such laws, Afghan Ambassador Omar Samad said the Afghan government is studying the law to determine its status, and pleaded for "patience and understanding".

Among the atrocious potions taken within the new legislation, the Afghan government wants to also make it illegal for a woman to leave the house without her husband's permission, and block women from being granted custody of their own children.

Samad said the law is intended to regulate family life only inside Afghanistan's Shia community (which makes up about 20 per cent of Afghanistan's 30 million people), and will not affect Afghan Sunnis.

Does that make it any more moral? NO. Fuck cultural relativism, fuck political correctness, and fuck any anthropologist who can rationalize these primitive (yes in the pejorative sense) notions of male dominance. It’s just not right.

Article 132 of the law says, and I quote, that a wife:

"is bound to preen for her husband as and when he desires. As long as the husband is not travelling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night. Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband."

The only response to this must be OUTRAGE.