Only in Iran. For a third time, the women of Iran have had to marshal forces to defeat a proposal by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to regulate legal “temporary” marriages. These so-called marriages are variously referred to as marriages of convenience, marriage for pleasure, and so on, and last anywhere from one hour to 99 years, many more of the former than the latter.
Temporary marriage is of much more benefit to men who want to engage in sex without running afoul of Shi’ite law than it is to Shi’ite women. Although it has been ridiculously promoted by Shi’ite clerics as "a means to help women who have difficulty getting married for various reasons.” What kind of nonsense is that? According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
A draft law introduced by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2007 to regulate the temporary marriages met with a great deal of public criticism, particularly from women's groups ... When the law was introduced in parliament in 2008, it was rejected by the parliamentarians, essentially ending the controversy, until now. Last week Ahmadinejad once again revived the law and brought it before parliament. His assumption was that since many of its opponents were no longer active--some were in jail and others had left the country--and since the parliament was controlled by a conservative majority, he would not have difficulty in getting it passed.
Even in Ahmadinejad’s Iran, where elections are famously stolen, parliament managed to reject a critical part of the law.
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Paul of CA 8:35PM March 10, 2011
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