And that would be desirable because...?

As an atheist, I'll be the first one to admit that I don't always understand why people do things. I don't get praying or speaking in tongues, I don't really understand the fatalistic acceptance of "god's will" or the unfounded assumption that everything that goes on in the world is really for the best at some abstract level. I am, in a word, accustomed, to being confused by the people around me on a fairly regular basis and, for the most part, I'm able to live with it. And yet, even with my general ability to handle things that don't make sense to me, this one stands out as particularly bizarre:

Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) has appealed to the Islamist-dominated parliament not to approve two controversial laws on the minimum age of marriage and allowing a husband to have sex with his dead wife within six hours of her death according to a report in an Egyptian newspaper. 

The appeal came in a message sent by Dr. Mervat al-Talawi, head of the NCW, to the Egyptian People’s Assembly Speaker, Dr. Saad al-Katatni, addressing the woes of Egyptian women, especially after the popular uprising that toppled president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

She was referring to two laws: one that would legalize the marriage of girls starting from the age of 14 and the other that permits a husband to have sex with his dead wife within the six hours following her death.

Okay, so, I don't mean that the opposition to said law doesn't make sense, I mean that the motivation to pass the law doesn't make sense. As pretty much all of you know, I'm a married man, and in the hopefully unlikely event that my wife were to up and die, I do not think that my first thought would be, "Well, it'd be a shame to waste a perfectly warm corpse." Nor would my second, third, or fourth thoughts be even vaguely in that direction. I am utterly and completely at a loss to explain not only why someone would react to the death of their spouse with the sudden urge to bang the corpse, but also why this inclination would be so widespread as to garner support from lawmakers.

Just... what the hell, Egypt?