Texas. Iran. What is the theological difference?

Tried under Sharia law, she was sentenced to death by hanging, while Darabi got 95 lashes.

Lethal injection chamber at San Quentin State Prison, California (Wikipedia)

(CALGARY, Alberta) - I was sifting through some archived files today and two articles jumped off the screen, wanting to be together. Although this may seem to be old news, it’s current because the overall cultural realities in both Texas and Iran, if they have changed at all, have only become more extreme through the intervening five years.

On August 15, 2004, Atefah Sahaaleh, aged 16, was hanged in a public square in Neka, Iran. She had been judged guilty of “crimes against chastity," adultery in particular—even though she was not married.

Last year, more than 250 people in Iran were executed (along with murder and drug smuggling, sex outside marriage is also a capital crime—Are you reading this Rick Perry?), putting Iran second after China. The next two in numbers of executions are North Korea and Yemen followed by the fifth: The United States. Not in good company. Claims by the U.S. to be a "civilized" nation are limited by this reality.

In one of the recent Republican “debates”, Governor Rick Perry was asked, because he had overseen 234 executions as governor, more than any other in modern times, if he had ever struggled with the issue that any one of them might have been innocent? (When the number of executions was mentioned, the audience burst into applause.) He replied:

“No sir. I’ve never struggled with that at all. The State of Texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear, process in place of which when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens, you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you’re involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is you will be executed.” (more applause)

In his answer, he completely ignored the question he was asked, of the possibility of innocence. Yet, considering how many death-row inmates have been exonerated in recent years through DNA evidence alone, I have no doubt that at least some of those executed were innocent.

Meanwhile, back in Iran

Soon after her release, Atefah became involved in an abusive relationship with a man more than three times her age. Former revolutionary guard, 51-year-old Ali Darabi—a married man with children, raped her several times. She kept this “relationship” a secret from both her family and the authorities.

Tried under Sharia law, she was sentenced to death by hanging, while Darabi got 95 lashes. Shortly before the execution, but unbeknownst to her family, documents that went to the Supreme Court of Appeal described Atefah as 22. "Neither the judge nor even Atefah's court appointed lawyer did anything to find out her true age," said her father. (As a signatory of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, Iran had promised not to execute anyone under the age of 18.)

Two years later, Sydney McGee, 51, an award winning art teacher with 28 years experience, was unceremoniously fired from her teaching job at Wilma Fisher Elementary School in Frisco, Texas. She is a fifth generation Texan with a grown daughter.

She had led, along with four other teachers, at least a dozen parents and a museum docent, 89 fifth-grade pupils through the Internationally recognized Dallas Museum of Art. She had gone on the tour herself beforehand and saw nothing she would have considered offensive. The tour had also been approved in advance by the principal, Nancy Lawson.

One of the students saw nude art in the museum, told his/her parents, who then complained to the principle and that was the end of Ms. McGee’s job. (The complainant was never identified). Lawson gave McGee a memo in which she said, in part: “During a study trip that you planned for fifth graders, students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations.”

(I suggest that to go through an art museum and not see at least a few nude pieces would be a newsworthy event in itself.)

Kevin Lungwitz is the Texas State Teacher’s Association’s general counsel: “Teachers get in trouble for a variety of reasons,” he said, “but I’ve never heard of a teacher getting in trouble for taking her kiddoes on an approved trip to an art museum.”

John R. Lane, director of the museum: “I think you can walk into the Dallas Museum of Art and see nothing that would cause concern,” going on to point out that over the previous decade more than half a million students, including about a thousand from other Frisco schools, had toured the museum’s collection of 26,000 works spanning 5,000 years, “without a single complaint.”

In retracing her route for the media through the museum’s European and contemporary galleries, she passed the marble torso of a Greek youth from a funerary relief, ca 330 B.C. E. with the label, “his nude body has the radiant purity of an athlete in his prime.” She passed sculptor Auguste Rodin’s Shade Aristide Maillol’s Flora (with her clingy sheer garment), and Jean Arp’s Star in a Dream.

The issue in both Iran and Texas is religious extremism. In Texas, for example, you cannot hold some offices, governor in particular without professing a belief in God. Atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, etc. are disqualified by law. This contravenes the separation of church and state—not that many Texans would notice.

In 1782, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject to coercion? To produce uniformity…Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.”

Charles Templeton, a former evangelist (he had team preached with Billy Graham at Madison Square Garden) wrote in his book A Farewell to God

“Many think of the church as a sacred institution and of priests and the clergy as men wholly dedicated to the service of God and humankind. This assumption has not always been valid; indeed, it has seldom been so. In the Middle Ages, in particular, the Christian church approximated a terrorist organization, being the instigator and the protagonist in the indescribable horrors of the infamous Inquisition....In France and, later, in other parts of Europe, beginning in the fourteenth century and peaking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tens of thousands of innocent men and women—even children—were persecuted, arrested, imprisoned, tried in secret, tortured, flayed, hanged, or burned at the stake in a protracted obsession with heretics, witches, sorcerers, black magic and demon-possession.”

Later, in his memoirs, Jefferson wrote that a member of the Virginia general assembly wanted to put the words “Jesus Christ” into the Virginia act for religious freedom and it

“was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”

Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Daniel Johnson as a teenager aspired to be a writer. Always a voracious reader, he reads more books in a month than many people read in a lifetime. He also reads 100+ online articles per week. He knew early that in order to be a writer, you have to be a reader.

He has always been concerned about fairness in the world and the plight of the underprivileged/underdog.

As a professional writer he sold his first paid article in 1974 and, while employed at other jobs, started selling a few pieces in assorted places.

Over the next 15 years, Daniel eked out a living as a writer doing, among other things, national writing and both radio and TV broadcasting for the CBC, Maclean’s (the national newsmagazine) and a wide variety of smaller publications. Interweaved throughout this period was soul-killing corporate and public relations writing.

It was through the 1960s and 1970s that he got his university experience. In his first year at the University of Calgary, he majored in psychology/mathematics; in his second year he switched to physics/mathematics. He then learned of an independent study program at the University of Lethbridge where he attended the next two years, studying philosophy and economics. In the end he attended university over nine years (four full time) but never qualified for a degree because he didn't have the right number of courses in any particular field.

In 1990 he published his first (and so far, only) book: Practical History: A guide to Will and Ariel Durant’s “The Story of Civilization” (Polymath Press, Calgary)

Newly appointed as the Deputy Executive Editor in August 2011, he has been writing exclusively for Salem-News.com since March 2009 and, as of summer 2011, has published more than 160 stories.

View articles written by Daniel Johnson

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