September 5, 2010

• cheerful thoughts

  The other day I was listening to the radio and only half paying attention when I heard this particularly depressing sequence of words being used in the context of a news story:

  “publicly stone a woman to death for alleged adultery”

  Oh, let me count the ways in which this is an absurd statement!

  1. “publicly”  -  Punishing people publicly is an archaic barbaric practice in and of itself. It turns law and order into a spectator sport.

  2. “stoning” – Stoning is a particularly cruel way to punish anyone. It’s also inefficient. If you want to cause someone pain there are much faster and easier ways to go about it. But those ways don’t have the visceral effect of having your community coming at you with hate and rage in their eyes tossing stones at you. Undoubtedly being stoned is terrifying and embarrassing beyond almost any other conceivable punishment whether or not it is done in public or to death.

  3. “to death” – Death penalties are themselves ridiculous and should be phased out throughout the world. Death by stoning is a particularly heinous method but even if it were hanging or guillotine or lethal injection it would still be sick and barbaric. Death is the last recourse of a society that has lost its imagination. It also doesn’t actually reduce crime.

  4.”adultery” – It’s ridiculous that adultery is a crime anywhere on this planet. The idea that the state should directly interfere with people’s personal life to the point of assigning criminal liability for simple infidelity is insane. Even if you judged adultery a crime and said society had a right to assign it as such, how on EARTH can it be a crime deserving of such a severe punishment? This likely makes consensual adultery a worse thing to do than rape, molestation, theft, assault, embezzlement, reckless endangerment, involuntary manslaughter, environmental desecration, and a host of other crimes.

  5. “alleged” – Even if you were to accept that adultery is a crime and that it should be punished by death by stoning in public, that would still be completely irrelevant since the crime in this case hasn’t been proven. It’s merely alleged! Certainly with a punishment that is that heinous and monstrous and cruel, you should be damned sure that you have the right person and that they really did commit the acts for which they are accused! Otherwise your justice system is just a sham.

  6. And last but not least “a woman”.  And herein lies the rub. The purpose of this legal system is to repress and suppress women.  How often do you hear about a man being publicly stoned to death for “alleged” adultery?  It doesn’t happen. (though to be fair sometimes the man with whom the married woman had an affair is also stoned with her) Because the man in the marriage makes the accusation and the authorities in those societies take the man’s word for it. This then is used to lock women into relationships that can be abusive and to ensure that they remain subservient to the male dominant class. The woman is made an example of so as to ensure that the society continues to see sexuality, particularly female sexuality, as a shameful thing that should not be expressed, at least not in public. But of course violent stoning of unarmed defenseless persons to death is perfectly fine to express publicly.

  That’s all I could see off the top of my head. But geez. How could just 9 words be so utterly deprived of sense and reason?  It sickens me that there exists places in this world where people can make such utterances without any realization of how absurdly wrong their actions are and how twisted their world view is.  And why does not the entire world rise of the decry such behavior with one voice and bring it to an end? Surely good people everywhere know better than this.

  Or do they?  Is it really so easy for people to be mislead into thinking something is right when all logic stands stoutly against it?

  What am I saying. Of course it is. It happens all the time.

  What kind of strange twisted world do we live in?

  • 9:38 pm
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