If you think religious fundamentalism is a cure-all for society's ills and just "the way things ought to be," think again.


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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/apr/26/married-at-10-abused-and-forced-to-flee-without-her-children-an-afghan-woman-on-life-under-the-taliban

Married at 10, abused and forced to flee without her children: an Afghan woman on life under the Taliban

Now living in comparative freedom in Iran, 26-year-old Mahtab Eftekhar describes facing motherhood at 12 and explains why seeking justice for other women means she no longer fears death

At the age of 10, while still in the third grade, I received news from my mother and stepfather that we would travel to Helmand province for my brother’s wedding. Little did I know, it was to be my own wedding, as my family had arranged my marriage to my cousin and sold me for 40,000 Afghanis [£500], without my knowledge or consent.

That night, after the wedding, I went to sleep beside my mother and little brother, only to wake up next to my cousin. Trembling from confusion and fear, I fled the room in tears and screams. But my mother and her sister coerced me back into that room. It was then that I was told I had been married to my cousin.


It was the beginning of an agonising nightmare that shattered my childhood and adult life.

Two years later in 2007, aged 12, I became a mother for the first time, but my child was born premature and disabled. She soon passed away. The next year, I gave birth to and lost another daughter. My husband’s family had refused to take her to the doctor when she was unwell because she was a girl, and not the boy that they had wanted so much.


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Remember this story?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/21/gender.religion

Of all the difficult public relations campaigns in the world, this must be among the toughest: to sell polygamy, the practice of keeping more than one wife by one man, as a deeply Christian, rewarding activity that frees the women as much as it forwards the spiritual standing of the man.

But that is the challenge Anne Wilde has taken up, as a sort of unofficial spokeswoman for the polygamists of Utah. There is a mystery to why this woman should be devoting herself to the cause when she has no apparent personal connection to polygamy, but we will come to that later. For now, she is sitting in her kitchen in Salt Lake City, explaining why taking multiple wives - "sisterwives" - is a necessary prerequisite for reaching the highest level of Heaven.

Wilde's purpose is made particularly tough because polygamy gets a consistently bad press, fuelled by events in some polygamist communities that appear to be anything but celestial. Today, the "Prophet" of a polygamist community in Utah, Warren Jeffs, will be brought handcuffed into court and the evidence presented in public for the first time. He is charged with assisting the statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl, who had allegedly been forced into a spiritual marriage with her cousin. The girl was said by prosecutors to have been ordered to "multiply and replenish the earth" - in other words, procreate - or risk eternal damnation.

It's tragic. My great-grandfather was a plyg with three wives, and the culture was honored by my father. I rejected it. The three wives were biological sisters, so all their children were both siblings and cousins. They were stepsisters and stepbrothers too. One of them was my grandfather. He married a hillbilly girl from Tennessee who was descended from slave owners.