Barbarity Beware!

The news that a woman, an "accused" adulterer, would not be stoned to death in Iran has been widely headlined as "good news." But here's the reality:  this 43 year old widow, who was found guilty of adultery, allegedly committed the crime after her husband was murdered. And now, after a much heralded international plea from Hollywood to Bollywood, news today has been released that the government will not seek to stone her. 


This woman, a mother, who has been imprisoned since 2006 for the crime of having sex outside of her marriage, even though she was widowed, will in all probability still die at the hands of the government. The Iranian state has not said it would release her nor did it clarify that it would not seek execution of another kind. 


International human rights activists seem momentarily relieved. The stoning is stayed. One US Embassy worker said, "Stoning, as a means of execution, is tantamount to torture. It's barbaric and an abhorrent act."  But here's what I am questioning:  shouldn't the international community be fighting against execution as a consequence of sex outside of marriage?? It seems to me that the barbarity lies in the execution -- whether by stoning, shooting, injection or firing squad. 


Let's start calling things as they really are:  killing adults for consensual sex is barbaric any place, at any time. The fact is that even the Koran, according to Islamic educators, does not call for stoning. It does call for lashing, for punishment, if there are actual witnesses to the act of penetration. In Mrs. Ashtiani's case, there were no witnesses, just a judge who seems to have had a grudge against her. And she has already lived through the punishment of 100 lashes for her alleged crime.


Legal, secular codes getting mixed up with religious law is the tricky business that fundamental Islamists, jihadists and other radical hardliners use to push their agendae forward and to rationalize their barbaric acts of domestic, gender and international terrorism.  They need to be stopped. Consensual sex is not an executable crime. It is a crime of the heart, perhaps. A crime of dishonoring a marital pledge. In fact, it has no place as a crime of the state at all.