Pakistan, June 2 -- No child stands at an altar by choice. Last week, Pakistan made a crucial move to end a national disgrace by signing the Islamabad Capital Territory Child Marriage Restraint Act, setting 18 as the legal minimum age for girls to wed. Ideally, this should have been a moment of shared national pride, but as is the norm in our part of the world, President Asif Ali Zardari's principled position has been met with a furious backlash.

Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman has declared this law an affront to Islam, rallying protests to defend what he terms "legitimate unions." The Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) echoes this, protesting clauses that criminalize the consummation of underage marriages as stat...