The oh-so-tolerant multiculturalists on the American left have got little or nothing to say (Sandra Fluke, call your office!)  about the glories of celebrating diversity in marriage laws, at least when it comes to our Muslim friends planning to make it legal to force a 9 year old girl into having sex with an older man as his putative “wife.”  In Iraq, so recently abandoned by our multi-culti cult figure President Obama, such a law is being contemplated. An AP dispatch (hat tip: Hot Air)from Baghdad reports:

A contentious draft law being considered in Iraq could open the door to girls as young as nine getting married and would require wives to submit to sex on their husband's whim, provoking outrage from rights activists and many Iraqis who see it as a step backward for women's rights.

The law is being proposed to accommodate the Shiite majority in Iraq, who would live under a different code than the Sunni minority.

The proposed new measure, known as the Jaafari Personal Status Law, is based on the principles of a Shiite school of religious law founded by Jaafar al-Sadiq, the sixth Shiite imam. Iraq's Justice Ministry late last year introduced the draft measure to the Cabinet, which approved it last month despite strong opposition by rights groups and activists.

The draft law does not set a minimum age for marriage. Instead, it mentions an age in a section on divorce, setting rules for divorces of girls who have reached the age of 9 years in the lunar Islamic calendar. It also says that's the age girls reach puberty. Since the Islamic calendar year is 10 or 11 days shorter than the Gregorian calendar, that would be the equivalent of 8 years and 8 months old. The bill makes the father the only parent with the right to accept or refuse the marriage proposal.

Critics of the bill believe that its authors slipped the age into the divorce section as a backhanded way to allow marriages of girls that young. Already, government statistics show that nearly 25 percent of marriages in Iraq involved someone under the age of 18 in 2011, up from 21 percent in 2001 and 15 percent in 1997. 

Saddam Hussein, for all his grotesque and horrific faults, managed to keep a partial lid on the more barbaric aspects of Islam. Obviously, many Muslims do not practice this form of child rape, but those who do so have the high ground, since the prophet himself took a child bride named Aisha, and she was known as his “favorite.” Since Mohammed is regarded as a perfect man and a model for all humanity, the weight of religious authority rests on the girl-rape side of the scales of Islamic theology.

The AP story, as headlined in the San Francisco Chronicle, speaks of girls being “allowed” to marry as young as 9. Does anyone really think 9 year olds are capable of understanding what wanting to marry means? C’mon, in the real world, these girls are sold/given to older men by their parents.

Compared to the ordeal of Sandra Fluke having to pay for her own contraception, this a real war on women, and a shameful one at that. The indifference of the American feminist (and gay, for that matter) left to the horrors of life in orthodox Islamic environments has only one explanation. They avert their eyes because seeing their comparatively minor grievances here in the perspective of a real war on women (or gays) makes the pettiness of their gripes self-evident.