Indian Parliament Outlaws Triple Talaq

India's Parliament yesterday gave final passage to The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2019 (full text) (bill summary). The bill now goes to the President for his assent. The new law outlaws "triple talaq", the procedure under which a Muslim husband divorces his wife by uttering the word "talaq" three times to her.  The law makes talaq (including in written and electronic form) illegal and provides for a fine and up to three years in prison for anyone declaring talaq. It also allows award of child custody and subsistence to a wife against whom talaq has been invoked. The bill replaces a presidential Ordinance issued earlier this year.  In 2017, India's Supreme Court held that triple talaq is invalid and ordered the government to consider appropriate legislation on the mater. Rediff and Reuters report on the bill.

From Religion Clause

The Pope's View on Women

Rome April 21- The Pope, addressing the Union of Italian Catholic Women today showed strong opposition to some of their ambitions.

"Those who wish to make the woman the equal of man in all things," said his holiness, "and give her the same rights are assuredly in error. Women mixed up in the agitations of public life would be the ruin of the family and society. Woman should be the companion of man, and at the same time accepting his authority, an authority mitigated by love and nothing more."

Source.

General Warns: Military Will Face 'Great Pressure' to Lower Standards for Women in Combat to Please ‘Agenda-Driven’ in D.C.

(CNSNews.com) - Marine Gen. John Kelly, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, said at a Pentagon press briefing on Friday that he believes that future generals will face “great pressure” to lower the standards for women in combat in order to get more women into combat roles.

“My greatest fear---and we see this happen a lot over the 45 years I've been in the Armed Forces--is right now they're saying we are not going to change any standards,” said Kelly. “There will be great pressure, whether it's 12 months from now, four years from now, because the question will be asked whether we've let women into these other roles, why aren't they staying in those other roles?

“Why aren't they advancing as infantry people—persons--I guess? Why aren't they becoming, you know, more senior?” he said. “And the answer is--I think will be--if we don't change standards, it will be very, very difficult to have any numbers, any real numbers, come into the infantry, or the Rangers or the Seals, but that's their business.”

“So,” said Kelly, “I think it will be the pressure for not probably the generals that are here now, but for the generals to come, and admirals, to lower standards because that's the only way it'll work in the way that I hear some people, particularly, the agenda-driven people here in Washington--or in the land--the way they want it to work.

Read the rest here.

Women in combat will put men at greater risk

Crickets.

This was the sound of the United States reacting to news this month that all military positions, including ground combat, will be opened to women.
 

It is axiomatic that the White House, and not just this one, makes controversial announcements when people are otherwise distracted. Usually, this means late Friday afternoons when there isn’t much time for the media to make trouble. This particular announcement came on a Thursday, the day after two vicious killers opened fire on a holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif. 

Ever since, all eyes have been on the assault and aftermath, as well as the antics of Donald Trump, while the notion of women in combat faded from the nation’s peripheral vision.

Arguments against this move are many, some of which I touched upon in a previous column that focused on women’s unequal opportunity to survive because of various physical differences. This time, I submit another crucially important but politically incorrect proposition: Men’s lives will also be put at greater risk if women are in combat.

The reasoning should be obvious. Plainly put, men tend to like women quite a lot and either will be tempted to express their attraction, and/or will want to protect their female companions.

Scoff if you must, but blame Nature.

Any combat veteran will tell you that unit cohesion is everything in battle. Common sense tells us that putting young men and women in the prime of their sexual lives together in the field, where the possibility of death is potentially imminent, is a potential — and unnecessary — gamble on unit cohesion. There is, after all, nothing like a funeral to remind the living of their mortal imperative.

Sexual tension is a most delightful distraction in civilian life. But in close quarters, where men likely would vastly outnumber the few women who qualify for combat, other human emotions — envy, jealousy and resentment — enter into a fray that’s already complicated enough.

Read the rest here.

Navy, Marines To Open All Jobs to Women

Ray Mabus has made up his mind: there’s no job in the Navy or Marine Corps that’s going to be off-limits to women.

With more than a month to go before the deadline, the Navy Secretary made it clear on Monday: he will not be requesting any exceptions to the Pentagon edict that all U.S. military jobs be opened to women.

“Nobody’s asking for an exemption in the Navy,” Mabus told an audience at the the City Club of Cleveland. “And I’ve been pretty clear about this for a while – I’m not going to ask for an exemption for the Marines.”

That may have come as a surprise to the Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. Joe Dunford; Marine Corps Times reported Thursday that Dunford had met with the secretary on the issue but had yet to issue his recommendations. Defense Secretary Ash Carter asked the services to complete their reviews of obstacles to full gender integration and report back by Oct. 1. If no service seeks or is granted an exemption, the military will open to women all 200,000 positions that remain closed to them on or before the first of the year.

Mabus spoke just a few days after publicly criticizing a Marine Corps study that compared the performance of ground combat units with female members to all-male teams — and found the women lacking. “In the all-volunteer study, the men consistently outperformed the women in speed and accuracy, while female Marines were injured at more than double the rate of their male counterparts,” Marine Corps Times reported.

In his Sept. 14 speech, the Navy secretary argued that the study wasn’t relevant to the debate.

Read the rest here.

I am so glad I got out when I did. These clowns are playing politics with lives. 

Fred Reed: Women in the Military - Fiat Equality

Sigh. I have just read that a young woman named Sage Santangelo has failed the infantry-trainimg course for Marine officers at Quantico, bringing the rate of female failure to 29 out of 29. As an old hand with thirty years covering the military, I can attest that this vu is getting more deja all the time. Women have never succeeded at physical things in the military becauese they can't. More on that in a moment.

Santangelo seems a most impressive woman. Any woman who would attempt the TBE course is necessarily impressive. We are not talking pampered Swarthmore brats in Women' Studies. She reports making her first solo lfight [sic] at fifteen, climbing most of Colorado's highest peaks, playing goalie on a boy's hockey team. She is Marine material, and has my respect.

But she washed out on day one. Even tough, fiercely determined, highly athletic women can't do it. It isn't their fault. We are born with the equipment we are born with.

Read the rest here.

Barking Mad

The US Military wants to let women into the special forces.

Marine Corps Commandant Vows No Lowering of Standards For Women In Combat

...Not surprisingly, the idea of women in the infantry draws sharp questions from many active-duty Marines and veterans, who express concerns that standards will be diluted for women.

In an interview, General Amos acknowledged hearing those worries and insisted that the corps would not lower its standards. To guarantee that, he plans to use the course, which Marines consider the gold standard of infantry training, to study the performance of potential female infantry officers and then use that data to develop requirements for enlisted infantry Marines.

In March, two Naval Academy graduates will become the second set of women to enter the course. Over the coming years, General Amos is counting on dozens more female volunteers to provide him with enough information to decide whether women can make it in the infantry. The outcome, he says, is far from certain.

“I think there is absolutely no reason to think our females can’t be tankers, or be amtrackers, or be artillery Marines,” he said, referring to tracked amphibious assault vehicles. “The infantry is different.”

General Amos said that if too few women were able, or willing, to join the infantry, he or his successor might ask the secretary of defense to keep the infantry closed to women. The deadline for that request is January 2016.

Read the rest here.

Some rare sanity on a very touchy subject.

90 Years Ago: Rebecca Latimer Felton becomes the first woman US Senator

Rebecca Ann Latimer Felton (June 10, 1835 – January 24, 1930) was an American writer, lecturer, reformer, and politician who became the first woman to serve in the United States Senate. She was the most prominent woman in Georgia in the Progressive Era, and was honored by appointment to the Senate; she was sworn in on November 21, 1922, and served one day, the shortest serving Senator in U.S. history. At 87 years old, 9 months, and 22 days, she was also the oldest freshman senator to enter the Senate. As of 2012, she is also the only woman to have served as a Senator from Georgia. She was a prominent society woman; an advocate of prison reform, women's suffrage and educational modernization; and one of the few prominent women who spoke in favor of lynching. 

Read the rest here.

Iran Restricts Women's Access To Universities

Female students in Iran have been barred from more than 70 university degree courses in an officially-approved act of sex-discrimination which critics say is aimed at defeating the fight for equal women's rights.

In a move that has prompted a demand for a UN investigation by Iran's most celebrated human rights campaigner, the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, 36 universities have announced that 77 BA and BSc courses in the coming academic year will be "single gender" and effectively exclusive to men.

It follows years in which Iranian women students have outperformed men, a trend at odds with the traditional male-dominated outlook of the country's religious leaders. Women outnumbered men by three to two in passing this year's university entrance exam.

Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates.

Read the rest here.

Islam: Returning the world to the Middle Ages one step at a time.

Get Over It! We Are Not All Created Equal

"No one questions why there aren't any females in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, etc. Olympic athletes are the elite of the elite. No one questions why the women compete against women and men against men. Those are great sports and achievements. But lives and missions aren't on the line. In our world, if you move slower one day, you don't get bumped off the medal stand, you could die or get someone else killed." 

-An anonymous female US Marine from this excellent article.

See also this outstanding related article.

Israel Faces Huge Rift Over Ultra-Orthodox And Women

JERUSALEM — In the three months since the Israeli Health Ministry awarded a prize to a pediatrics professor for her book on hereditary diseases common to Jews, her experience at the awards ceremony has become a rallying cry.

The professor, Channa Maayan, knew that the acting health minister, who is ultra-Orthodox, and other religious people would be in attendance. So she wore a long-sleeve top and a long skirt. But that was hardly enough.

Not only did Dr. Maayan and her husband have to sit separately, as men and women were segregated at the event, but she was instructed that a male colleague would have to accept the award for her because women were not permitted on stage.

Though shocked that this was happening at a government ceremony, Dr. Maayan bit her tongue. But others have not, and her story is entering the pantheon of secular anger building as a battle rages in Israel for control of the public space between the strictly religious and everyone else.

At a time when there is no progress on the Palestinian dispute, Israelis are turning inward and discovering that an issue they had neglected — the place of the ultra-Orthodox Jews — has erupted into a crisis.

And it is centered on women.

“Just as secular nationalism and socialism posed challenges to the religious establishment a century ago, today the issue is feminism,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University. “This is an immense ideological and moral challenge that touches at the core of life, and just as it is affecting the Islamic world, it is the main issue that the rabbis are losing sleep over.”

The list of controversies grows weekly: Organizers of a conference last week on women’s health and Jewish law barred women from speaking from the podium, leading at least eight speakers to cancel; ultra-Orthodox men spit on an 8-year-old girl whom they deemed immodestly dressed; the chief rabbi of the air force resigned his post because the army declined to excuse ultra-Orthodox soldiers from attending events where female singers perform; protesters depicted the Jerusalem police commander as Hitler on posters because he instructed public bus lines with mixed-sex seating to drive through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods; vandals blacked out women’s faces on Jerusalem billboards.

Read the rest here.

Israel: Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Demands On Women Stir Controversy

BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — A sign outside a row of synagogues directing women to walk on the other side of the street has turned this town near Jerusalem into a front line of a raging national debate about the imposition of strict social codes by ultra-Orthodox zealots.

A community of 86,000 about a half-hour’s drive from Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh has a growing ultra-Orthodox population. The town has become a cauldron of tension in recent days, with crowds of black-cloaked men assaulting television crews and facing off with police, pelting them with rocks and eggs.

The trigger for the violence was a wave of Israeli media reports about ultra-Orthodox Jews in the town who had put up the controversial sign and hounded local religious schoolgirls, spitting and hurling abuse at them for what they deemed insufficiently modest dress.

The plight of one frightened girl, 8-year-old Naama Margolese, was highlighted Friday in a prime-time television report, along with the sign ordering sidewalk segregation, fueling the debate in Israel over attempts to limit the public visibility of women — a growing trend that has generated an angry backlash.

On Tuesday night, thousands of Israelis gathered in Beit Shemesh to protest religious coercion and the attempts to sideline women. Some held up signs that said: “Exclusion of women is my red line.”

Read the rest here.

Defending Traditional Values

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani lawmaker defended a decision by southwestern tribesmen to bury five women alive because they wanted to choose their own husbands, telling stunned members of parliament this week to spare him their outrage.

"These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them," Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents Baluchistan province, said on Saturday. "Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid."

The women, three of them teenagers, were shot and then thrown into a ditch. They were still breathing as their bodies were covered with rocks and mud, according to reports, which said their only 'crime' was that they wished to marry men of their choosing.

Source