Iraq: Constitution writing Canada's gmarriage hurts Women's Rights in new Iraq Constitution, I speculate

Yesterday's London UK daily The Independent is emblazoned with the title I hoped I would never see, "New Iraqi constitution must follow Islam on women's rights, says Shia," in an article by Kim Sengupta, July 21, 2005. Explicitly, women should be curtailed in their rights in regard to marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws, according to the committee drafting this part of the proposed constitutional text.

"We reject the changes prepared on the 1959 law because some Islamic parties want to kidnap the rights of women in Iraq," said Yanar Mohammed, a women's rights activist and head of Women's Freedom in Iraq Movement. "We reject such attempts because women should be full citizens with full rights, not semi-human beings."

I feel very sad at this news and the need for those like Yanar Mohammed to put their eneregies into such a basic concern that one would think would be easy for the Shia to grant. Emotionally, it connects for me with the worldwide publicity given to Canada's new laws demoting marriage and replacing it with a generic business arrangement without any reference to the differentia that make the three kinds of intimate union, each so richly unique in which the intimate union of 1man1woman constitutes a special bond across all the contrasts of physiogamy, biochemistry, mood structures, and stage-of-ife structures that make that kind of couple a special case, which the state may have its own interest of prioritization. Now that such distinctions are in pitiful shambles, and Canada's example touted around the world in that regard, why wouldn't Shia in Iraq react to the very idea of Woemn's Rights in marriage. But, then of course, for them there's the whole polygamy consideration. Maybe they can show Canada the way on that issue, I ironize. But, seriously, what happens to the chldren in the male-dominated Shia marriage, divorce, and inheritance arrangements? - Owlb