Married at 10? Divorced at 12? Hey, Who Wants to Play ‘Guess Which Religion’?
Posted on | March 4, 2010 | 41 Comments
If you guessed “Lutheran,” try again:
Nujood is a Yemeni girl . . .
(Doggone, I was going to guess “Belgian.”)
. . . and it’s no coincidence that Yemen abounds both in child brides and in terrorists . . .
(Beware of the Utah Liberation Front!)
For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. . . .
(I’m guessing the deliveryman was Methodist, right?)
Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. . . .
(Typical patriarchal Methodist!)
Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her. . . .
(Methodists don’t take “no” for an answer.)
Yemeni journalists turned Nujood into a cause célèbre, and she eventually won her divorce. The publicity inspired others, including an 8-year-old Saudi girl married to a man in his 50s, to seek annulments and divorces. . . .
(Saudi Methodists — the worst kind.)
At first, Nujood’s brothers criticized her for shaming the family. . . .
(No self-respecting Yemeni Lutheran would get divorced.)
There are a couple of reasons countries that marginalize women often end up unstable. First, those countries usually have very high birth rates . . .
(Pre-pubescent girls can’t get pregnant, but the time to explain that to a Yemeni Methodist deliveryman is probably not on his wedding night.)
Second, those countries also tend to practice polygamy and have higher death rates for girls. That means fewer marriageable women — and more frustrated bachelors to be recruited by extremists. . . .
Polygamy and extremism – these are frequently occuring problems among fundamentalist Methodists. But maybe you noticed something kind of interesting here:
Not once in the entirety of his 807-word column did Nicolas Kristof name the religion of Nujood and her ex-husband.
Wonder why that is?

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