This is both sad, utterly pathetic, and beyond repellent, Reuters and various other sources report …
An eight-year-old Yemeni girl died of internal bleeding on her wedding night after marrying a man five times her age, a social activist and two local residents said, in a case that has caused an outcry in the media and revived debate about child brides.
Arwa Othman, head of Yemen House of Folklore and a leading rights campaigner, said the girl, identified only as Rawan, was married to a 40-year-old man late last week in the town of Meedi in Hajjah province in northwestern Yemen.
“On the wedding night and after intercourse, she suffered from bleeding and uterine rupture which caused her death,” Othman told Reuters. “They took her to a clinic but the medics couldn’t save her life.”
There was an attempt to stop this from happening, in February 2009, a law was created in Yemen that set the minimum age for marriage at 17. Unfortunately, it was repealed after more conservative lawmakers called it un-Islamic … so once again we are back to an insanely bad belief endorsing and encourage paedophilia.
Why?
Well, as I’ve pointed out before, since it was fine for Mohammed to be a paedophile back in the 7th century (At the age of 50 he married a 6 year old), then it is believed by some to be just fine for his followers to do exactly the same today. The key is that Mohammed is believed to be perfect and infallible and since he buggered small children, then that makes that just fine.
Finally a note of caution: do all Muslims think that buggering small children is a jolly good idea? No of course not, most are decent human beings and are just as repelled by this as you are. The problem here is that at the core of the belief this idea is embedded and is not negotiable, and so has been utilized to justify this horror, and ensure that it persists.
As I’ve pointed out before – believing things that are not actually true has real-world consequences.
How big a problem is this?
“According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), between 2011 and 2020, more than 140 million girls will become child brides. Furthermore, of the 140 million girls who will marry before the age of 18, 50 million will be under the age of 15.”. Not all of that consists of middle aged men marrying toddlers, but does illustrate that this is an issue that is not restricted to small numbers.
Human Rights Watch has urged Yemen’s government in December 2011 to ban marriages of girls under the age of 18, and warned that it deprived child brides of education and harmed their health. If you also check the United Nations and government data, nearly 14 percent of Yemeni girls were married before the age of 15.
As for the Muslim who was insisting to me that all this is just a couple of ignorant goat herders and that it is not “true” Islam – well you might wish to reconsider that thought, and remember, the reason that the age limit in Yemen was repealed is because it was un-Islamic.