There’s always something bizarre coming out of Saudi Arabia. It would be laughable if it wasn’t for the fact that these occurrences adversely affect women, in more ways than one.

So, it seems that sports should be forbidden for unmarried women because

“Football and basketball are sports that require a lot of movement and jumping,” Sheikh Abdullah al-Maneea, member of the official Supreme Council of Religious Scholars, said in a religious opinion published in Okaz newspaper Thursday.

He said such excessive movement may harm girls who are still virgins, possibly causing them to lose their virginity.

Their breathtaking ignorance never fails to amaze me. Maybe someone should inform the Sheikh, that technically speaking one loses one’s virginity through sexual intercourse, not by playing a game or two of basketball.

You couldn’t make this up if you wanted to.

It seems the men in Saudi Arabia don’t care a whit about the health and well-being of their women over there. First of all women are forced to cover themselves from head to toe, depriving them of much needed Vitamin D, which is a major factor in bone problems. And, in spite of segregated gyms, they still make it difficult for women to get much needed exercise, which is also essential for good health-

“The idea of female fitness is non-existent within our government,” said Fouziah Alouni, a prominent women’s rights campaigner.

“Depriving women of this is yet another way of marginalizing them. Give us a justifiable reason or leave woman alone. This is unbearable.”

The result has been high rates of diabetes and even bone frailty among women, which the Ministry of Health says it wants to combat.

Sure, it wants to combat this problem. How are they doing that? By closing down more gyms because they are not licensed. And why is that? Because the government doesn’t seem to want to create a licensing board for female gyms, although there is one for men. Sure, they want to eliminate these health issues as long as women remain covered up and at home. According to Madawi Al-Hassoun, the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce has tried for 3 fruitless years to get the government to establish some means of licensing female gyms, to no avail.

“Some people don’t like women to go out of their homes. This is a common struggle for female businesses in Saudi,” she said.

Then again, physical education is banned in public schools in the Kingdom. So why should they approve of gyms?

H/T Weasel Zippers