{"id":3200,"date":"2005-08-30T10:17:07","date_gmt":"2005-08-30T10:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/08\/the-iraqi-constitution.html"},"modified":"2005-08-30T10:17:07","modified_gmt":"2005-08-30T10:17:07","slug":"the-iraqi-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/08\/the-iraqi-constitution.html","title":{"rendered":"The Iraqi Constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.asianews.it\/view.php?l=en&amp;art=4002\">Chaldean bishop cautiously optimistic, but with questions<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/ct\/2005\/135\/23.0.html\">Paul Marshall of Freedom House is a bit more concerned:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"arttext\">Another concern is Article 39, dealing with personal status\u2014marriage, custody, alimony, and inheritance: &quot;Iraqis are free in the adherence to their personal status according to their own religion, sect, belief, and choice, and that will be organized by law.&quot; Most discussion of this has focused on its potential to undercut women&#8217;s rights, but its effects can be far wider: People could be forced into a legal status dictated by a religious group whether they wanted to or not, and their individual religious freedom could be undercut, especially since many interpretations of <em>Shari&#8217;ah<\/em> give one set of rights for Muslim men, another for Muslim women, and quite another for non-Muslims. These provisions can further reinforce the second-class status of Iraq&#8217;s already beleaguered Christian community, now roughly 3 percent of the population and rapidly shrinking.<\/p>\n<p class=\"arttext\">This contradictory draft constitution provokes many <em>cans, coulds<\/em>, and other concerns. Its clauses might be used either to bolster or to limit religious freedom. Since the Iraqis are continually adapting the document, the United States should discreetly push particularly for changes in Article 39 and the &quot;Islamic identity&quot; provisions in Article 2. If the constitution is accepted in the October referendum, the other worrying clauses could become much less worrisome in the hands of capable judges who reinforce the document&#8217;s human-rights guarantees. In this, as in so much else, the major effect of the constitution is going to depend on the quality of the government that enforces it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>o<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chaldean bishop cautiously optimistic, but with questions Paul Marshall of Freedom House is a bit more concerned: Another concern is Article 39, dealing with personal status\u2014marriage, custody, alimony, and inheritance: &quot;Iraqis are free in the adherence to their personal status according to their own religion, sect, belief, and choice, and that will be organized by&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Iraqi Constitution - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/08\/the-iraqi-constitution.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Iraqi Constitution - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Chaldean bishop cautiously optimistic, but with questions Paul Marshall of Freedom House is a bit more concerned: Another concern is Article 39, dealing with personal status\u2014marriage, custody, alimony, and inheritance: &quot;Iraqis are free in the adherence to their personal status according to their own religion, sect, belief, and choice, and that will be organized by&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/08\/the-iraqi-constitution.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2005-08-30T10:17:07+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Iraqi Constitution - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}