While Donald Rumsfeld and his chuckle-headed apologists crow about the outcome of the Bush administration’s use of lies and deceit to justify war on Iraq, we might remember that the war zone created in Baghdad has led to a couple things: armed Islamist militias controlled by local clerics and the rise of rape and terror against women.

Zeinab, a 24-year-old computer science major who declined to give her last name, would drive her own car to college before the U.S. invasion, but now she’s only permitted to leave the house for school with the man she jokingly calls her driver-bodyguard-chaperon.

The beauty salons she used to frequent for pedicures and conversation are closed, so Zeinab spends much of her long hours at home in front of a mirror, practicing different hairstyles for the day she regains a social life.

Girls lost most of their freedom here a long time ago, but now we’ve lost it all, she said angrily. They want to protect our honor.

[LA Times]

And:

Sheik Nasseri, for instance, has been giving the Friday sermon at the main mosque in Sadr City, where he has railed against Americans as infidel colonizers and sanctioned the killing of unveiled women who refuse to comply with his rules, as well as the killing of Muslims or non-Muslims who sell liquor.

[NY Times]

Just in case you have forgotten: these are the same conditions–precisely the same conditions–that led to the establishment of the Islamist tyranny in Iran, and were used to justify forced veiling and other misogynist repression. And they are also the same conditions–precisely the same conditions that led to the horrors of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

So thanks, Donald, for lying to us about weapons of mass destruction in order to carry out your dirty little war. What an awful outcome indeed.

Lest you fear, gentle reader, that I have lost myself in the Bush administration’s house of mirrors and can no longer talk about anything but the damned war, I would like to take this time to mention the fact that, contrary to the claims of the Right’s war marketing gurus, women in Afghanisan continue to face brutal attacks, and it turns out that women’s liberation was not particularly served by bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and imposing a puppet government dominated by jihadi thugs (you know, the jihadi thugs who chased out the old jihadi thugs… who in turn had chased out the jihadi thugs that we put back in power).

Over the past several weeks, eight terrorist attacks have targeted girls’ schools with bombs, arson, and gunfire. In Kandahar, the site of the most recent bombing, hand-written pamphlets were distributed back in April threatening violence if women took jobs or attended school. The city was also recently the site of the attempted assasination of Gul Agha Shirzai and Puppet-in-Chief Hamid Karzai. Thanks to the US, the country is no longer in the iron fist of jihadi dictatorship; instead, it is now being blown to hell all over again by a whole host of self-appointed holy warriors and straight-up marauders and goons.

Afghan women have been crying out for more security, but the Bush administration is too busy figuring out its next war for liberation to do a damn thing. Given the fact that the US government put Afghanistan in this horrible mess, and most Afghans (other than the warlords themselves) are begging for us to help restore peace and stability, it seems to me that maybe, just maybe, the U.S. government ought to consider expanding the presence of international peace-keepers outside of just Kabul. Indeed, it would be nothing less than evil to carelessly skip around the globe spreading death and destruction while ignoring the mess that was already created by the war for regime change in Afghanistan.

Take Action!

Stand in solidarity with the women and girls in Afghanistan who are facing constant attack from the self-appointed holy warriors of the male supremacist counter-revolution. You can help support embattled girls’ schools in Afghanistan by donating money and/or school supplies to RAWA and the Afghan Women’s Mission. These attacks on Muslim women cannot be allowed to stop girls’ education again.

Second, contact the Bush administratin to demand that the U.S. government live up to its claims to support a safe and free Afghanistan, by responding to the Afghan people’s requests for an expansion of international peace-keepers beyond Kabul.

O.K., so I was planning on putting out a post about the silly little debate that the conservative and libertarian webloggers were having amongst themselves recently about the liberal Southern white boys who inhabit their own media bubble. But for the time being Andrew Sullivan’s pit of narcissism website is offline, so that will have to wait.

In the meantime, however, I would like to bring a happy addition to the web world to your attention. For your reading pleasure, Bitch Magazine has converted their online (S)HITLIST section into a very readable MovableType weblog format. They update about twice a month or so, and their archives are eminently readable. Warning: this weblog may cause sleep deprivation – the night I found out about this I ended up getting to sleep about 4 hours later than I’d intended, because I spent so long combing through their entire archives.

In Swaziland, a tiny country surrounded by South Africa, sub-saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy maintains a regime of tyranny over the women of the nation. Under Swazi law, women are considered minors, and cannot own property, acquire a bank loan, or enter into a legal contract without the consent of a male relative. The King is promising that a new constitution will be written sometime soon now, but with no commissions or discussion at all in the palace about gender equity, its’ likely that this new constitution will merely recycle status quo ante as far as women are concerned.

In a recent fit of misogyny that veers into the completely senseless, Jim Gama, a power behind the throne and Right-wing hate radio host near the capital Mbabane has ordered that soldiers strip women wearing trousers in the royal villages. (One is reminded of the Shah’s charming little habit of having soldiers tear off women’s chadors with bayonetts during his campaign of forced Westernization.) According to women’s rights activist Pholile Dlamini, Gama became the most powerful traditional authority in Swaziland because he "endeared himself to the national leadership by being a super traditionalist who regularly belittled women on the air."

Meanwhile, in totally unrelated news that I don’t at all intend to link with the preceding story: power-behind-the-throne Dick Cheney decided to spend the anniversary of the September 11^th massacre building national unity and currying mainstream consensus by sitting down for an interview with Rush Limbaugh, a Right-wing hate radio host who endeared himself to the national leadership by being a super-traditionalist who regularly belittles women on the air.

But I digress.

So let’s say that you’re a mother in Florida, who has gone through with the achingly difficult decision to put your child up for adoption. It’s a situation no-one would want to be in, but apparently Florida legislators have taken it upon themselves to make it even harder [CNN]. Under a law passed last year, Florida women putting children up for adoption are required to print an advertisement detailing their sexual history in their hometown newspaper.

Yes, that’s right. The bio-mother must publish a newspaper advertisement trying to find the bio-father of the child which lists the woman’s name, age, and description, along with descriptions of any men who might be the bio-father of the child. The ad has to be run in papers in every city where the woman has lived or traveled in the year before giving birth where the child might have been conceived, which is to say, her hometown and possibly the hometown of all the relatives and friends she went to visit. Privacy? What privacy? The law does not even make exemptions for survivors of sexual assault; unless you’re in Palm Beach County (where you are protected by a local court ruling), you will have to list your rapist if he is possibly the bio-father of the child.

This is one of those laws that is so utterly bizarre and senseless that it cries out for further explanation—how did anyone actually come up with this bill? Who thought it was a good idea? What committee put it forth as a step forward for the state of Florida?

The genius behind the bill is Democratic state senator Walter Skip Campbell, who has been described as the ultimate male chauvinist pig. It was claimed [SP Times] that the bill was introduced to clarify the rights and responsibilities of all parties involved in an adoption so that cases such as the custody battle over Baby Emily would not happen again. In the Baby Emily case, the bio-father of Emily, a convicted rapist, filed suit to contest her mother’s decision to place Emily up for adoption. It took three years of court battles for the Florida Supreme Court to finally rule that he would not have received custody. And when they did rule against him, they based their decision that on whether or not the bio-father had met technical requirements for abandonment of the mother under Florida law. They held that it did not matter whether or not Emily would be worse off from being placed in the custody of a convicted sexual predator; all that mattered was whether or not the bio-father could exercise his supposed biological rights to custody of the child.

Supposedly, this is supposed to prevent protracted court battles by establishing a process and a time limit for the bio-father to come forward. But, Christ, people. In order to avoid situations such as this, they could have:

1. Passed a law which says Rapists can’t contest the other bio-parent’s decision to put the child up for adoption
2. Passed a law enabling men who think they might be the bio-father of a child to submit their name into a registry so that they can be notified in case of adoption proceedings. The state could then ask the woman for names of men who might be the father and check it against the registry, without forcing her to publish this information in the newspaper.

Of course, even if they created such a system, the basic idea behind the Baby Emily case—that a bio-father can just come forward after years and assert a right to tear the child out of the home she grew up in, just because he happens to share 50% of her DNA, is bullshit. The Father’s Rights movement believes otherwise, of course. I suggest that they get over their mental roadblocks by chanting this daily mantra: My DNA is not a license of ownership; my dick is not that important. While we’re at it, I also suggest: I care about my child’s welfare, not my fatherhood rights.

The fact is that being a bio-father or bio-mother of a child means very little in the grand scheme of things. Who cares whether or not your reproductive organs work? Who cares whether it is the bio-mother’s fault or the bio-father’s fault that the bio-father wasn’t involved in the decisions about the child’s future? That may be a reason to take legal action against the bio-mother, but it’s no reason to tear the child out of her home and send her over to the bio-father who never had any relationship with her. What matters is the established relationships that the child has grown up in, and her welfare in a given home environment. If more people would realize this, then we’d need a lot fewer regulations of adoption in the first place.