Judge refuses divorce for pregnant woman

Pakistan? Iran? Saudi Arabia?

Nah: Washington.

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — In a case that outraged women’s rights groups and prompted a change in state law, an appeals court has sided with a judge who voided a woman’s divorce because she was pregnant.

The appeals court ruled Spokane County Superior Court Judge Paul Bastine was correct in vacating the divorce order because Carlos Hughes and the state had not been properly notified of Shawnna Hughes’ pregnancy.

Call me Shirley, but one would think that particular law might be hauling around some constitutional luggage.

The pregnant woman’s husband was serving time for a domestic violence conviction at the time she filed.

The reasoning behind the law was that the state wouldn’t know who to go after for child support if the divorce went through while the woman was pregnant.

It doesn’t make any more sense no matter how many times you read it.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, some form of Islamic rule over personal status laws — divorce, equal rights, etc. — now appears inevitable. Iraq will be moving away in law from the generally egalitarian constitution that was the nominal law of the land under Saddam, as it is already moving away in fact. The now-defunct Washington state law under which a woman was denied a divorce because she was pregnant may well see service in Iraq, assuming women retain the right to divorce at all.

For some reason, some people are shocked that a bunch of Iraqis who spent the past few decades sheltering in Iran are not only kindly disposed toward making Islamic law the basis of the new Iraqi constitution, but are determined to use their majority status to achieve it.

The whole shape of this latest version — whose precise details remain in flux — would set in stone the Islamist agenda that the Shia religious parties (SCIRI, Dawa, and their allies) have long pursued with single-minded intensity. As early as December, 2002, a major London conference of Iraqi exile groups sponsored by State Department ended by issuing two statements — one in Arabic, the other in English — whose only difference was whether Islam should be “a source” or the “sole source” of future (post-Baathist) Iraqi law. In January, 2004 the same Islamist groups unsuccessfully sought to overturn Iraq’s admirably progressive 1959 personal status law — covering marriage, divorce, custody, inheritance and related matters — and impose sharia through religious courts.

But this was not the political platform that the Shia religious parties actually campaigned on while forming the bulk of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shia coalition assembled and blessed by Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani, Iraq’s preeminent religious leader. This coalition essentially traded on Sistani’s immense prestige, with local clerics commanding the faithful to vote for the “Sistani List” — one of more than 100 parties or coalitions with vague platforms and mostly unnamed candidates — as a matter of religious obligation binding in conscience (and therefore a grave sin to vote otherwise). It is no surprise that these parties are seeking to translate a one-off, artificial advantage into permanent political gains, despite hiding behind vague platitudes (“Islam is the answer”) while posing as the authentic representatives of Iraq’s most respected figure.

Of course it isn’t a surprise. Why, then, is John Cullinan (described in his National Review Online column as a former “senior foreign-policy adviser to the U.S. Catholic bishops”) surprised? Even the Bush administration saw this one coming; handing the country off to Ahmad Chalabi was meant at least in part as an end run around the exiles returning from Iran, as was the original plan to avoid elections for three years or so while the CPA and the Iraq Governing Council ran the country.

So when the premier religious authority in Iraq demanded direct elections, deducing that the electoral list bearing his imprimatur might lean toward the theocratic side of the equation oughtn’t to have been much of a stretch.

It’s notable, and genuinely unsurprising, that Cullinan manages to find a way not to hold Sistani or the US responsible for the situation. It is a bit surprising that he finds a way to cast the US as the hero of the affair, nobly battling a perfidious Iraqi government and its duly elected executives to salvage womens’ rights.

Although he’s not as explicit about it as some defenders of the invasion and occupation, he’s tacitly invoking a modified version of the “orphan defense,” where the child who kills his parents throws himself on the mercy of the court as a pitiable orphan.

And the final word from Baghdad Washington: “It could not be ascertained Wednesday whether the divorce still is on hold.”

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.