When
Political Correctness Places Girls in Harm's Way
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
May 23, 2017
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Photo Credit: Susan
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Jada was looking forward to high school in her New Jersey hometown when
her father, a recent convert to Islam, decided they should move to Saudi
Arabia. Jada's mother had passed away suddenly a few years earlier. It was
just the two of them now, and so Jada went with him alone. Soon after, on a
walk to the local grocer, her father instructed Jada to move to his right
side and stay there. This, he explained, was how men would know she was for
sale.
She was only 12 years old.
You may have heard Jada's story before. It has received widespread
attention, largely through the efforts of the Maryland-based Tahirih Justice Center,
which works to end child- and forced marriages and other forms of violence
against women and girls. You may have heard about Jada's half-sister, who
worked to rescue her although the U.S. State Department could offer no help
in the face of Saudi laws. Thanks to her, and to the efforts of Tahirih and
others, Jada made it home to America before her father could sell her into
marriage.
But other girls in New Jersey may not be so lucky. And they don't need
to be brought to Saudi Arabia to be married off. At 12, Jada was not old
enough to get a driver's license in her home state; but she was old enough
for a marriage license so long as she had her parent's permission. Indeed, according to Fraidy Reiss, executive director and
founder of Unchained
At Last, "more than 2,000 children as young as 13 were married
legally in New Jersey between 2000 and 2014." For these girls, such
marriages involve being forced to have sex with men they barely know. There
is a word for that: rape.
In recent years, the Tahirih Center, along with Girls Not Brides,
Unchained At Last, and others, have helped support bills that would end or curtail laws allowing child marriage. Texas and
Virginia passed measures requiring a court to declare minors "legal
adults" before they can marry, regardless of parental consent. And
earlier this month, New Jersey legislators also passed a bill that would
prohibit anyone below the age of 18 from marrying. No exceptions. Child
marriage opponents celebrated; it was the first time a law had been passed
in the United States banning child marriage outright.
Except New Jersey governor Chris Christie has refused to sign it. His
reason: the bill "does not comport with the sensibilities and, in some
cases, the religious customs of the people of this state."
He sent the bill back for revision, demanding that marriages involving
minors over the age of 16 remain legal, subject to judicial review. Given
that past such judicial reviews have granted marriages to 13-year-olds,
this position is hardly reassuring to his opponents. To his credit,
however, Christie did accept an outright ban on marriages involving those
15 and under – a change from existing law.
But what is most striking is the call to consider "religious
custom." Child marriage, after all, is almost always religion-based,
and takes place not only in Muslim communities but in Christian and Jewish
families as well. Reasons for forcing children into marriage include
"controlling the children's sexuality and behavior, and protecting
'family honor,'" Reiss said.
There is reason, however, to think that it was Muslims like Jada's
father whom Christie was trying to protect in his veto. Yet protecting
"honor" in the name of religion is precisely why so many Muslim
girls and women are murdered by their families – their fathers, brothers,
husbands, even mothers – in so-called "honor killings."
Christie has a long history of placating Muslim fundamentalists. In
2011, he appointed a radical Islamist pawn, Sohail Mohammed, as a state
judge despite Mohammed's ties to the New Jersey-based American Muslim
Union, which claims that "a Zionist commando orchestrated the
9/11 Terrorist attacks." According to past Investigative Project on
Terrorism reports, Mohammed also served as counsel to Palestinian
Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian, and "objected to the use of the
phrase 'Islamic militants' in the government's case" against the
"Fort Dix Six," a group of Muslim extremists convicted in 2007 of
plotting an attack on Fort Dix.
As U.S. Attorney, Christie defended Islamic Center of Passaic County
imam Mohammed Qatanani, who has been accused of having ties to Hamas and who has called Israel's founding "the greatest disaster
which occurred on the face of the earth." The Department of Homeland
Security is fighting to deport him.
These and other gestures suggest that Christie supports just the kind of
Muslim conservatives who reject Western (and American) views of women and
of marriage and who are likely to sell their young daughters into marriage.
At the very least, he seems to recognize that it would be politically
inexpedient to reject them: New Jersey boasts the second-largest Muslim population in America, next to
Michigan and, according to Pew Research, "two or three times as
many Muslim adults per capita as the national average." Moreover,
immigrants from Southeast- and South-Central Asia represent the second-largest group of newcomers to the
state after Latin America. These are also regions with notably
high rates of child marriage (particularly India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh, all three among
the largest of New Jersey's Asian immigrant groups).
But because it is not only Muslim girls who are forced into marriage and
subsequent marital rape, it all the more notable that Christie's veto came
just weeks after the European parliament determined to tackle child marriage worldwide. Unlike the Europeans,
Christie has now agreed to place the religious views of extremists before
the basic rights of women and girls. But for the state to sacrifice human
rights to religion is not who we are as Americans. And it is not what we
can allow ourselves ever to become.
Abigail R Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates.
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