75 Year Old Syrian Woman Sentenced to 40 Lashes, Prison, & Deportation in Saudi Arabia

by Teh Nutroots | The charge: "having two unrelated men in her house." (CNN) 

Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam called Wahhabism and punishes unrelated men and women who are caught mingling.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, feared by many Saudis, is made up of several thousand religious policemen charged with duties such as enforcing dress codes, prayer times and segregation of the sexes. Under Saudi law, women face many restrictions, including a strict dress code and a ban on driving. Women also need to have a man's permission to travel. (CNN)

One of the two young men protested that he was the woman's son under Islamic law because she'd breast fed him as a baby and that the other young man had come along with him to deliver bread to her. (CNN)  Sadly, they couldn't prove it.  As a result, they're also due for lashings (40 for one and 60 for the other) and jail time.(CNN)  

The good news is that a high-profile Saudi human rights lawyer has agreed to take their case: the same lawyer who represented the gang-raped girl who was sentenced in 2007 to 200 lashes and six months in prison "for meeting an unrelated male."  King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz ended up pardoning her. (CNN)

Andrew Sullivan calls this "a useful reminder."   If so, so is this:

The headline of the story at Brazil’s Globo is “Arcebispo excomunga médicos e parentes de menina que fez aborto.” To translate: “Archbishop excommunicates doctors and parents of child that had abortion.”

The story is thus: A 9-year-old girl was raped by her stepfather and impregnated with twins. The girl would very likely die if she continued the pregnancy. While Brazil has strict anti-abortion laws, under Brazilian law it is legal for her to have an abortion, which she does. The Catholic Archbishop then excommunicates the parents of the girl, and the doctor that performed the abortion.

The Vatican backed up the decision to excommunicate the parents and doctors.

“The law of God is above of any law human being,” said Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho.. So when a human law ... is contrary to God's law, this human law has no value," Cardoso had said.

He also said the accused stepfather would not be expelled from the church. Although the man allegedly committed "a heinous crime ... the abortion - the elimination of an innocent life - was more serious". (Yahoo News)

I guess the elimination of the impregnated child's innocent life if she'd carried the twins to terms would just have been involuntary manslaughter?  Because there's more to the story:

Melissa McEwen:

The stepfather is also suspected of repeatedly sexually assaulting the girl's teenage sister, who is disabled.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, a senior Vatican cleric and head of the Catholic church's Congregation for Bishops, explained: "It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated." This, despite the fact that the reason the abortion was granted in a country where abortion is otherwise illegal was because the little girls was pregnant with twins, which likely would have ruptured her uterus, killing her along with the fetuses. So irrespective of the fetuses' dubious "right to life," they wouldn't have fucking lived, anyway.

See Melissa McEwen's further comment on this here.   Taylor Marsh says:

It will be interesting to see if Secretary Clinton weighs in on the 75-year-old woman whom the Saudis have decided to punish in a manner (I’ve got a call in) that is as barbaric as it is flagrantly against Clinton’s core belief in women’s rights being human rights.

I don't get it.  I am not a person of faith myself, but I'd feel really bad for God if I were.

Memeorandum commentary here.

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