Twitter is rolling its eyes at a bill proposing to make it mandatory for children to get married at 18

A draft of the “Sindh Compulsory Marriage Act, 2021” was submitted to the Sindh secretariat on Wednesday, and seeks to address “societal ills, child rapes, immoral activities and crime” by making it mandatory for children over 18 to marry. Under the proposed bill, parents will be required “submit an undertaking with justified reason of delay before the deputy commissioner of the district” if their children are not married, and upon failing to do so, they would have to pay a fine of Rs500 each. The bill also wants to put a ban on dowry and establish standard operating procedures (SOPs) for weddings. The draft was submitted by MMA MPA Syed Abdul Rasheed, who argued that this would help fight “competition” and motivate people to organise simpler weddings. Rasheed also announced the submission of the draft on his Twitter account. In a video, Rasheed claimed that the obstacles in the way of marriages nowadays, like unemployment and high costs, were a direct “result of distancing from Islamic teachings.” He spoke about unemployment causing delay in marriages, saying the problem was “society’s tendency towards competition”, which had “spoiled a lot of legal and correct ways”. As soon as the news of the…
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