“Rape Law” Only Afghanistan’s Problem?

So there are all these articles cropping up all over the news about what’s being referred to as the “Afghanistan ‘rape’ law”. These stories inform us that Afghanistan is so outrageously backward that it permits “a man to have sexual intercourse with his wife even when she says, “No.”” Ohmigod! Husbands can rape their wives and get away with it? Amazing, I know. According to the linked article, President Obama rightly calls this law abhorrent. But wait a minute — are we so smugly confident that our own country is “civilized” enough that marital rape is something shocking and foreign? From about.com (and echoed elsewhere):

Until 1976, marital rape was legal in every state in the United States. Although marital rape is now a crime in all 50 states in the U.S., some states still don’t consider it as serious as other forms of rape. The only states that have laws that make no distinction between marital rape and stranger rape are Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.

On a related note, some of you might remember that as recently as 2006, a court in Maryland decided that women cannot say no after intercourse has begun. That ruling has since been overturned (but it was law in Maryland for a couple years, while I personally was living there, too) but I think it’s telling that such decisions are made in the first place.
You know that thing about courage to change the things I can? We can change this. This is our own culture and our own law. That isn’t to say that I don’t think the state of affairs in Afghanistan is also outrageous, but let’s not pretend as if “those people” are the one with the problem.