(READ): Anti-Islam T-shirts Rile Fla. School (Work of a local church)…

Source: CBS News/AP & Democratic Underground

A lawyer for a north Florida school district says a handful of students have been sent home from Alachua County schools this week for wearing shirts that read “Islam is of the Devil.”

School district staff attorney Tom Wittmer says the shirts might have offended or distracted others and violated the district’s dress code.

The shirts are connected to a local church called the Dove World Outreach Center. Church Senior Pastor Terry Jones tells The Gainesville Sun that spreading the church’s message is more important than education.

The congregation says a 10-year-old elementary school student was sent home Monday because of the shirt. Three high school students were sent home Tuesday and a middle school student also had to change clothes.

“Students have a right of free speech, and we have allowed students to come to school wearing clothes with messages,” Wittmer said, according to the Gainesville Sun. “But this message is a divisive message that is likely to offend students. Principals, I feel reasonably, have deemed that a violation of the dress code.”

Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/26/national/main…

READ: New Rule; Afghanistan passes ‘barbaric’ law diminishing women’s rights…

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Rehashed legislation allows husbands to deny wives food if they fail to obey sexual demands

Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands’ sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review.

The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.

“It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying ‘blood money’ to a girl who was injured when he raped her,” the US charity Human Rights Watch said.

In early April, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown joined an international chorus of condemnation when the Guardian revealed that the earlier version of the law legalised rape within marriage, according to the UN.

Although Karzai appeared to back down, activists say the revised version of the law still contains repressive measures and contradicts the Afghan constitution and international treaties signed by the country.

Islamic law experts and human rights activists say that although the language of the original law has been changed, many of the provisions that alarmed women’s rights groups remain, including this one: “Tamkeen is the readiness of the wife to submit to her husband’s reasonable sexual enjoyment, and her prohibition from going out of the house, except in extreme circumstances, without her husband’s permission. If any of the above provisions are not followed by the wife she is considered disobedient.” Read More