Send via SMS

Tuesday, June 04, 2002

Everybody Must Get Stoned

According to Reuters – a Nigerian woman, sentenced to death by stoning, has been given a two-year reprieve to wean her baby. By itself this is a slightly odd story. The really strange part is when you find out her crime: adultery. That’s right, she was sentenced to death for having a child out of wedlock. This is the second woman to receive this punishment since 2000 when the predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria adopted strict Islamic sharia law.

How do people choose to vote in a set of laws that punishes theft with amputation? I can understand the countries that have had these laws in place for centuries, but to decide in the decade to follow such an inhuman system of justice makes you question the true evolution of man. We are supposed to be moving towards spiritual enlightenment, not backwards into the dark ages.

Normally I am all for letting countries grow and find their own way. Nothing says what we are doing her in the United States is the right way or the best for everyone; but the path Nigeria is now on is borderline barbaric. And they know it. In March, an appeals court reversed a similar sentence after receiving worldwide pleads for clemency and a warning from President Olusegun Obasanjo that Nigeria faced international isolation over the case.

This means they know they are wrong.