Trinity, Tara, I get what you are saying about the authorities breaking up polygamist camps as soon as they faind them, but that it may be hard to find them because the United States is such a big country.
And of course we should talk about polygyny, not polygamy. Polygamy just menas that one person has many spouses, but polygyny means that one man has many wives. Of course we are always talking about one man haveing many wives, never about one woman having many husbands. There is in fact a word for the latter phenomenon, polyandry, but that sort of thing hardly exists in the real world.
I still think that it's wrong that religions should be granted special protection. Consider the case of headgear, as I referred to earlier. I am supposed to tell boys in my classes to take off their baseball caps, but I am strictly forbidden to ask a Muslim girl to remove her headgear. The reason for why I am supposed to ask boys to take off their baseball caps is that many people find them offensive. However, the reason for why people react negatively to the caps is, or so I think, that the caps are somehow associated with gang culture in the United States. Somehow boys in Sweden who like to wear baseball caps are supposed to support criminal gangs in United States and in Sweden. I don't think that this is a reasonable assumption at all. Very many boys just think these caps look cool.
What about the girls, then? In many Muslim countries, girls have little freedom. Relatively large groups of girls in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq don't go to school at all. Often they are given away in arranged marriages when they are as young as twelve or thirteen. After they have been given away in marriage, their husbands have the legal right to beat them, at least in some Muslim countries. Many women in many Muslim countries have to accept that their husband can take himself one or more additional wives. They have to accept that their husband can divorce them by simply uttering a "divorce phrase" three times, and thereafter the women will be legally abandoned by their husband whether or not they have any other means of supporting themselves. Huge numbers of adult women in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia are not allowed to have a job, and in Saudi Arabia they are not allowed to drive a car, either. In the strictest Muslim countries, women are not allowed to even go outside their houses unless they are covered in big and bulky veils and robes. In several countries, for example Iran, a woman may be lashed in public if she ventured outside without a veil.
For all of these reasons, I associate the Muslim veil with oppression of women. Yes, I know very well that all veiled Muslim women are not oppressed, but don't tell me that there is no connection between strict rules about compulsory Muslim headgear for women and the kind of widespread oppression of women that I just described above. My point is, if I am supposed to associate baseball caps for boys with criminal gangs in the United States, why am I not allowed to associate headscarves for girls with oppression of women in strict Muslim countries? I don't buy this contradiciton and I don't accept it.
Ann
