Why women can't vote in Saudi Arabia

"What's the point of voting? Even if we did vote, we would go home to the men in our lives who will have the last say in whatever we do."

These are the words of Rima Kahled, a 20-year-old Saudi woman referring to the fact that women will not be allowed to vote or to run for office in Saudi Arabia's first nationwide elections. Some of her peers are outraged, while others--believing that only men have the intelligence to vote--are satisfied with the decision.

Here is the official "reason" women can't vote in the elections: There are not enough women to run women's-only registration centers and polling stations, and only a fraction of the country's women have the photo identity cards that are needed to vote. Few women have the cards because in order to have their photograph taken, they have to remove their face coverings.

Got that? Before you shake your head in total disgust, please bear in mind that during the 1970's in America, women "couldn't" be sports reporters because there no women's bathrooms near the press boxes, and Congresswomen couldn't use the Congressional gym because there were no women's bathrooms. (It makes you wonder what they did with all of those extra Colored Only bathrooms they had to build in the 40's and 50's.)

Begging the question has long been a favorite method for denying people their rights, so it is no surprise that it is now a method of choice in Saudi Arabia.

The administration likes to brag about its international women's rights achivements--even while both the Northern Alliance and the Taliban are continuing to suppress women and girls in Afghanistan. Few nations suppress women's rights as much as Saudi Arabia, whom the Bush administration has identified as our close ally.

Someone with a lot of television time and newsprint space needs to point out the huge hypocrisy in the Bush White House's "commitment" to international women's rights, but don't count on that happening.