bill:politics

The BBC is reporting that Pakistan’s Assembly has passed a new law amending how rapes are prosecuted, taking them from the religious to the civil courts. Their version of Sharia (Islamic law) required a woman to bring four men to bear witness of her accusation, or else find herself being charged for adultery. You may recall the punishment for adultery in Pakistan is stoning.

While I’m glad to see this development, assuming the upper house of the legislature also passes it and key US ally Dictator/President Pervez Mussharaf signs it, I’m frankly sick at the reaction of the country’s religious leaders. Religious parties boycotted the vote, saying the bill encouraged “free sex” and that the new legislation will be “a harbinger of lewdness and indecency in the country.”

Because, of course, the raped women are responsible for what happened to them. There really are no rapes in Pakistan, despite research from the country’s independent Human Rights Commission showing there are at least 15 a day–the men are honest and true believers and the sex that happens does so because loose women tempt men beyond any reasonable resistance!

This seems to be the same sad line of reasoning that requires Islamic women to wear hijabs and burkas as well require them to be accompanied by a male from their household when out of the home. To do otherwise simply breaks men of their ability to keep their hands, and other body parts, to themselves.

One has to wonder, then, how men such as myself manage it, in the decadent American society where women flaunt uncovered skin anywhere one looks. I’m 45 years old and somehow lived all these years without forcing a woman to have sex against her will and, as far as I know, neither has male of my acquaintance. Which is not to say none of the women I know have been raped, sadly several have suffered this terrible violation. Fortunately, none of them required four (male) witnesses to ‘prove’ the crime occurred.

Though I ought to expect crap like this, I’m still surprised when the Bush Administration pulls stunts like putting a journalist in jail for refusing to give up videotape he made of a protest last summer in San Francisco. The guy was blogging right up until the court hearing from whence he was sent to the stir.

Really unbelievable and yet a totally transparent ploy. California law protects the press so–on the flimsiest of connective tissue–the fact that the SFPD gets federal funding, the Justice Department jumped in and brought the case in federal court. Of course the judge had to go along with it and he did.

The other question I have is whether the major media outlets will jump on Wolff’s story as they did in the celebrated Judith Miller fiasco. Coverage by the local daily is not the same, but we need to hold the government accountable for yet another board in our fence of rights pulled away.

Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress. I agree with the aims and tactics, so I added the campaign awareness widget on the top of the sidebar. For a much better explanation of what this is all about than I can offer, read Rebecca Blood’s post China, the Internet & Human Rights - a long analysis.