"CEDAW was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 18, 1979. Afghanistan has ratified this treaty. The United States has not."
"Today, the spectacle of America condemning child marriage abroad while refusing to adopt the international treaty that prohibits it is a moral and legal incoherence that undermines every word we say."
https://www.qasimrashid.com/p/the-taliban-legalizes-child-ma...
Particularly disturbing is how much pushback there was to the recent Oklahoma bill to finally end child marriage two weeks ago. Thankfully it passed anyway, but the state house vote was 51-36. Some of the quotes from the house members voting against the law are rather chilling, e.g.:
“This was a vote in favor of parents rights over government overreach. It’s possible that some people are comfortable with the government overriding parental decisions, but I’m not one of them. To vote yes on this is a vote to let the government dictate how to parent your children.”
- Rep. Clay Staires (R-Skiatook)
AFAIK, California, Mississippi, and New Mexico still lack a minimum age for marriage.
Incidentally Iraq's parliament told the US military to leave in 2020 and the US has refused. So this is going on under the continued US military occupation of this country.
Two things can be true at once:
1. The US invaded on false pretenses. We should never have been there.
2. Saddam Hussein and his family were brutal dictators who shouldn't be mourned. We didn't exactly topple the leadership of, say, Sweden.
Hussein was a secular leader in much the same way as Stalin was. Their horrific abuses weren't driven by religion, but that's little comfort to the lives they destroyed.
Eh what? Hahahaha
Can someone explain why this is on HN tho
The most famous case was when Lucien Carr killed David Kammerer. The just called it an honor slaying.
No person should ever be killed, and it should never be justified because its the social norm.
As a gay guy I've had str8 ppl tell me "you can still go to Egypt just you know, don't be gay". It's infuriating, depressing, and so much more.
Honestly, sometimes I kind of understand the tiniest bit of the queer peeps that were getting extra spicy like last year. Society is an amorphous blob of averages and if you don't fit into the average...well.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/gay-basher-g...
6 years is not a lot, but it's the same length of sentence handed around the same time to a random murderer who killed a welder from Thailand.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/killer-of-thai-welde...
From these we know two things: a human life is not worth a fuck in Canada, but at least gay and non-gay is about the same.
If you can make the vehicular homicide look like an accident, you are scot-free, except for increased insurance premiums. No criminal charges, and no civil case to face.
Can you cite a case in the last 5 years?
Can you cite a case in the last 20 years where the jury didn’t roll their eyes?
Do we need to make a law for every hypothetical thing?
Men and women rarely interact, like many Muslim majority countries. It is odd for most people to talk to the other gender who is not their direct family. Found the stereotypes we have in the west of women were the same there but more exaggerated. A tough existence.
>>Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs!
>Thereafter, the account goes, no suttee took place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice)#Opposition_to_...
Imperialism gets a bad rap—and it can be bad—but it wasn't black and white as the rash and motivated slogans in the street would have you believe. Empires can have a beneficial and civilizing effect on peoples who are unable or unwilling to address certain issues themselves. The British Empire was a huge force in halting the slave trade. The Spanish—allied with surrounding tribes—put an end to the murderous and psychotic Aztec elite; the Mayans experienced a similar fate. Sati in the Indian subcontinent is another example. Rome's civilizing influence on Europe's barbarians is also well-known.
But I find these arguments a bit tired. I'm not familiar with Sati but I know the Indian subcontinent has been civilized, if not united, for thousands of years. The British brought different values and culture, for sure, and a plethora of benefits. But I can't agree that they had a "civilizing effect" on a people who already lived in a civilization.
> Empires can have a beneficial and civilizing effect on peoples
You can't trot out Kipling's "white man's burden" without at least acknowledging the historical and racial context around it. And in my opinion, justifying imperialism because it's civilizing a lesser people is a sure route to the cruelest forms of domination via chauvinism and white supremacism.
I think it would be better justified as a sort of corporate merger: Your company organization sucks and we think we can get better outcomes for both companies if we put your company under our management.
> The British Empire was a huge force in halting the slave trade.
This is true. At the dawn of the industrial age, those pioneers of industry outlawed their chief competition in the most noble, high-minded, and selfless act of compassion in human memory.
> The Spanish—allied with surrounding tribes—put an end to the murderous and psychotic Aztec elite
Also true. Of course, they then proceeded immediately to set about extorting and exploiting the locals.
But, oh, bombs, drones and air strikes will yield much better long-term results in Iran.
Helps when religious leaders are against it. The Catholic church was against forced marriage which is why that mostly died out in Europe during the middle ages.
Film and media are very powerful for shaping attitudes. Of course, can you expect them to be made or viewed or released in a country with a problem like that?
Severe laws and a regime willing to enforce them. The law is a teacher. Murder by itself deserves death—this falls out of the definition of justice in a straightforward manner—so at the very least, such a regime would have the murderers executed. Accessories would be punished in due proportion of their complicity. But how to have such a regime in such a country? Democratic processes only amplify existing pathologies.