LIBERATIONIST THEOLOGY (via Jim Yates):

Miracles at the ballot box (Steve and Cokie Roberts, Feb 4, 2005, Jewish World Review)

A baby girl called Intekhabat was born in Iraq on Monday. Her mother, according to the Al Arabiya News Channel, named her the Arabic word for "elections" as a permanent reminder of the history-making day before the baby's birth. It was a day when Iraqi women stared down danger to go to the polls and vote for a parliament that will, by law, be one-third female.

The photos of Iraqi women smiling beneath their headscarves, holding up purple-stained thumbs as they bravely emerged from the voting booths, did not just inspire goose bumps. They also told an important story about the future of Iraq. The female turnout was "extremely important, overwhelming almost," enthused Carina Perelli, the United Nations official charged with overseeing international observers in Iraq. She said it means "the whole society is having a voice in this constitutional process."

That female voice is finally being heard, to varying degrees, in several spots around the Muslim world. The Iraqi election follows the October balloting in Afghanistan, where women who had not been allowed out of their houses a few years ago showed up in greater numbers than men in some provinces, despite threats of retribution. (In other provinces, very few women voted; the overall turnout was about 40 percent.) One Afghan woman told the Associated Press that a man who spied her walking to the polling place threatened to cut off her hand if she returned with the telltale ink stain on her thumb. She was nervous about the walk home, but that didn't stop her from voting.

A woman in line at a polling station in Kabul noted that the other women peacefully waiting represented all different ethnic groups. "For the first time," she said, "women are having a say in the future of Afghanistan. We are fed up with war." Having a say was what a Kurdish woman who voted last weekend in Iraq also celebrated. "Until now, I have not been able to make my voice heard," she told the AP, "But I hope that with the help of the deputies I elect, my voice will reach the parliament in Baghdad."

The history of politics teaches that these Muslim women have a right to be hopeful.

It is one of the many delightful ironies of the Bush age that no one will have ever done more to liberate women.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 4, 2005 12:15 PM