Cake Eater Chronicles: This is simply amazing. I

October 01, 2004

This is simply amazing. I

This is simply amazing.

I can't quite get over this photograph.

I really can't.

It's amazing. See that bespectacled woman in the black hijab? She's a poll worker and she's trying to hold those women back. They were so eager to cast their vote for president that they stormed
the polls.
It's amazing. Particularly when less than three years ago these women
couldn't have left their houses by themselves without living with the
fear of being stoned to death for immodesty.
Why? Because the Taliban said they couldn't and they were willing to
back their laws up with force. Under the Taliban, women weren't allowed
to go to school. Or work. Or to the market to buy food for their
families. Or any other place without some male relative tagging along
to protect the general male population from their evil-woman ways.
Because that's why Islamic women wear headgear and burqas: not to
protect them from leering men, but rather to protect the leering men
from temptation. Women are inherently evil and just create temptation;
by forcing them to wear all that cloth, the men are just protecting
themselves. In the Afghanistan of the Taliban this discrimination was
legally sanctioned. Fast forward almost three years later to today.
Do you see any men in that photograph? I didn't either. And, as best as
I can tell, the polling stations weren't segregated, either. Yet today,
despite all these women have gone through, they were equal in the eyes
of men who, just a few short years ago, would have cast the first,
second, and third stone, and who would have just kept on winging rock
upon rock until that woman was dead. Are you getting it yet? This was
the right fight to pick. This isn't a fight over stoning that, given
their position in society, they never would have been able to win. This
is a fight over whether or not they should be able to partake in
government to ensure they never have to worry about being stoned to
death for walking alone to the market ever again. And they won that fight.
It makes me so incredibly proud, as an American, that one of the
benefits of the War on Terrorism is the fact that these women have been
liberated. This is democracy in action. THIS IS WHAT WE'RE FIGHTING FOR. Something good came out of 9/11. We made it happen. We took lemons and made lemonade.