On a scale of ‘bad things you can do’, I’m not sure where I would put adultery. Is it more evil to exchange bodily fluids with a person other than the one you’re married to, or surreptitiously pass gas on a crowded elevator? Is it better to cheat on your spouse or cheat at cards? I can’t decide. In Canada, adultery is not a punishable offence. We are lucky. We had a cool prime minister who said, ‘‘There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.’’
Countries, like religions, disagree as to what acts justify severe punishment. In China you can be killed by firing squad or lethal injection for tax fraud, killing pandas or stealing cultural relics. Singapore has a mandatory death penalty for drug smuggling. India has the death penalty too, by hanging, but only in exceptional cases. Iran uses death by stoning to punish, not serial murder, not child rape, not treason, but — adultery.
On the scale of ‘bad things you can do to people who do bad things’, stoning has got to be at the high end, in between ‘decapitation’ and ‘being trampled by wild elephants’. The person being so punished is put into a sack and buried up to the waist if male and up to the chest if female. Stones bigger than pebbles, but not big enough to kill quickly with one or two hits, are thrown by volunteers(!?). If the person can get out and run away, then they are freed, which is obviously more likely for a man than a woman. It can take from twenty minutes to more than an hour until the person is battered to death.
According to the Hadith, the stories of the Prophet from which Islamic scholars draw inferences, Mohammed ordered stoning in a number of cases of adultery. He didn’t seem to recognize any discrepancy in severity
between the crime and its punishment. He kindly allowed a pregnant woman who had committed adultery to bear her child first, wean him, and then be killed by stoning. Even when the people of the region wanted to punish an adulterous couple by painting their faces black and parading them through the town facing backwards on a donkey, Mohammed ordered the couple stoned to death instead. The story ends with this telling
detail: the man bent his body to shield the woman as the rocks were hurled.
Other religions have shown more compassion for those having difficulty with monogamy. The Hindu gods have such complicated love lives that adultery doesn’t always figure as a no-no. The Jewish god did want to punish adultery with stoning, but the Jewish rabbis so hedged his commandment with procedural restrictions that he couldn’t get his way. The Christian god wisely said ‘‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’’, and that put a stop to the proceedings.
I tried to watch a YouTube video of an
actual stoning, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I watched the Monty Python sketch. In typical Monty Python fashion, things go awry, and the man who ordered the stoning gets stoned instead.
Mina Ahadi, a human rights activist, said there are at least 12, and up to 50 women in danger of being put to death by stoning
in Iran.