If women are equal under the law, why are two women required as witnesses to one man?

Al-Hewar Center,
The Testimony of Women in Islamic Law

and call upon two of your men to act as witnesses; and if two men are not available, then a man and two women from among such as are acceptable to you as witnesses... (2:282)
...
The verse goes on to explain the reason for seeking testimony from two women in place of the testimony of one man, by saying "...so that if one of them should make a mistake, the other could remind her" (2:282).

One can almost hear Mohammed adding, "Dumb bitches..." to the last paragraph.

Muslims love to sing the praises of burqas and hijabs and point out that Muslim women actually Loooooove being covered up. I constantly read that in Muslim forums and sites. If that is true, if Muslim women looooooove being covered up, then why do you need to beat them, whip them, stone them, arrest them and kill them if they don't want to wear them? If they can't wait to slip into something black and tent-like, why would you need a law forcing them to do so?

The Memri Blog,
21 May 2007,
Police, Improperly Clad Women Clash In Tehran

Male and female police officers clashed with women who were not dressed according to the Islamic dress code.

We have pooper-scooper laws to make people pick up after their dogs crap. No one in their right mind would assert that Americans love their dogs' poop and just can't wait to scoop it up. Listen Farooq, the reason we force people to pick up after their animals is precisely because they hate to do so. The only time we whip, stone, and beat our citizens is when we need to make them do something they really, really, really hate to do. In fact, if we wanted American women to wear burqas that's precisely what we would have to do; but we would not pretend that they loooooove it after we gave them a good whipping.

The outside world complains that America objectifies women, treats blacks abysmally, and allows only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants to succeed in the very highest rungs of society. Oh really? Oprah Winfrey is worth more than one and a half billion dollars that she made in anti-woman, anti-black America. I wish someone would hate and objectify me in that way.

Let me say that America is not perfect and certainly we have many problems with gender relations, race relations, and age relations. But so what? I would prefer to live in an imperfect Capitalistic society than in the perfect Muslim world one finds in Saudi Arabia and the paradise of Iran.