Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail. - Abraham Lincoln
Saudi court tells girl aged EIGHT she cannot divorce husband who is 50 years her senior
I'm not sure where to start on how much this sickens me, no matter how you word the event.
An 8 year old girl was married off to a 58 year old man. A father sold his 8 year old daughter to a man as a bride because he was strapped for cash. The mother is powerless to stop it.
The judge has dismissed the plea, filed by the mother, because she does not have the right to file such a case, and ordered that the plea should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty
It is unfortunate that there are still parts of the world where women are treated as property. At this point, I've come to the conclusion that the father did not have one shred of compassion or love for his daughter. The only reaction from the father other than being adamantly in favor of the marriage is:
They said that the father had set a verbal condition by which the marriage is not consummated for another 10 years, when the girl turns 18.
It makes me cringe. I wish this was just some story from the Bible - something from thousands of years ago that doesn't happen anymore. It reminds me of the story of Lot, who was willing to give his daughters away to a group of men to be raped as long as they left a few angels alone.
Most people are aware that I am agnostic. I don't believe in organized religion. One of the reasons is that the text associated with most religions don't change. They don't adapt or update to reflect progress and raising of moral standards.
While, luckily, virtually all countries have outlawed slavery, cruel and unusual punishment, genocide, and many other despicable acts, passages that seem to condone them remain in many major religious texts, including the Qur'an and the Bible. In countries where religion and government are intertwined, we see these ancient and ignorant ideas of treating other people alive and thriving. We see countries condoning fathers selling their 8 year old daughters to 58 year old men.
Even in countries where church and state are supposedly separated, we see these ideals. Within the last century, women did not have the right to vote in this country. It was less than 50 years ago that African Americans were given true equality. And today, we still see people using passages from the Bible as reasoning to ban same sex couples from having the same rights as other couples - all the while eating shellfish (insert irony here) and wearing clothing made from more than one material. I don't have a strong belief of whether or not there is a God. I prefer Clarence Darrow's explanation of agnosticism:
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means.
I do not believe that religion or a belief in God is required for a person to be good. I think people have done some terribly evil things in the name of religion (1, 2, 3). Morality is secular, defined by society (and at times influenced by religion when it dominates a society). I also believe that a universal current in morality is that it naturally pushes toward the protection of a human being's free will. That is the key of morality; allowing people to practice their free will, as long as it does not encroach on another person's free will.
When we apply this idea to a father selling his 8 year old daughter to a 58 year old man, we see that this is not moral. While the father and the 58 year old man are able to practice their free will, the will of the daughter is ignored by the men, and denied by law.
In the United States, if we apply this to gay marriage, we see that it is moral. We have two adults that both wish to practice their free will and form a bond together. What is not moral, are people who would wish to suppress that free will, even though the bond between the couple in no way affects the opponent's own free will.
It seems so simple. The idea of protecting a person's free will is the same as the golden rule: do onto others as you would have them do to you. Would you want your father to sell you to an old man as a bride? Would you want people to prevent you from getting married just because they didn't agree with who you loved?
The more I look at the world from the viewpoint of this idea, the more I realize that our society is still very much in a stange of infancy.
There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children. - Nelson Mandela
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