Kay Bailey Hutchison: “I rise to talk about the Casey- Hutchison amendment which was added to the bill before us last week. I did not speak…”

“I rise to talk about the Casey- Hutchison amendment which was added to the bill before us last week. I did not speak before the amendment was agreed to, but I think it is important to highlight it, particularly in light of things that happened just last week in Afghanistan. The amendment that was agreed to is an amendment that would focus on women and girls in Afghanistan and their plight. Sadly, the day before Senator Casey and I filed our amendment--with many wonderful cosponsors from the Senate--to help address the plight of women and girls, a tragedy was reported in the newspaper. A 14-year-old girl from a village in Afghanistan was beheaded by two men. The justification for beheading this child--who was going to fetch water--was that she, with the support of her family, had declined to marry one of the men. Gasitina was a student--a brave act in itself for a girl in Afghanistan--and she was butchered while fetching water because she would not, at the age of 14, marry one of the men. In October, another young woman's throat was slashed because she refused to work as a prostitute. Honestly, some of the women who are forced into prostitution are killed because of what they do. In September, three young women, two of them sisters, were attacked by six men because they were television actors and the six fundamentalists believed their dress was immodest. The sisters barely survived, but their friend bled to death from horrific stab wounds outside a mosque.…”