Whipping women who don't know their place? Check.
Punishment that proves the point of the woman's "illegal activities?" Check.
Is this the plot of an important novel showing how religion can warp peoples sense of morality? A film showing how women suffered in a long ago, unenlightened time? A parable on the dangers of Dominionism and Patriocentric bronze age beliefs in the modern world?
Nope, it's just "modern" Iran.
The Envoy at Yahoo brings us today's news to both make you sick and piss you off.
An Iranian court has sentenced an Iranian actress to 90 lashes for her role in a new Australian-made film
90 lashes? And not with a wet noodle either? What the hell did she do, shoot a porn in Mecca?
portraying social alienation, drug use and political oppression in Iran.
Oh. Ah. Um. All I can imagine is the following exchange.
"This film says that we alienate and oppress people here in Iran."
"Those bastards! Round them up then alienate and oppress them. That will teach them!"
While I hesitate to use the word "lucky" at anytime when referring to the violent abuse of women under a draconic theocracy, at least they didn't try to stone her to death.
Which I am sure would have been the sentence for filming a porn in Mecca.
"In an outcome that could have been lifted from the pages of the movie's script"--"My Tehran for Sale"--the film's lead actress, Marzieh Vafamehr, "was arrested in July and received her sentence at the weekend, according to reports quoting Iranian opposition website kalameh.com," the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
"Vafamehr often appears with a shaved head and no headscarf in the film, which also explores cultural oppression in Iran and taboos such as drug use," the paper said.
Granaz Moussavi, the Melbourne-based Iranian-Australian director of the film, declined to comment to the paper out of respect for the actress' family's wishes. Her portions of the film were "shot on the sly in Iran with a local crew in 2008," the paper said.
No headscarf? Shaved head? Shot on the sly? ....
Sorry, I can't bring myself to sarcastically imply this is a rational reaction. I try not to use the word much, but this is evil.
And fucking insane.
Since its disputed 2009 presidential elections, Iran has intensified a harsh crackdown against those perceived to violate its strict Islamic code, but often sentences are cruel and arbitrary. A moratorium had been declared on stoning in 2002, but the nation's Islamic courts have continued to hand down stoning sentences in accordance with the strict wording of the law. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but human-rights groups estimate that scores of women were stoned to death in Iran during the 1980s and 1990s. One documented case of such a stoning was captured on a horrifying video in 1994. In 2009, two men were stoned to death in Iran on charges of adultery and murder.
Two gay teenagers, identified only by their initials, were stoned to death in Iran in 2005, and two gay men received a death-by-stoning sentence last year after filming themselves having sex.
Various parliamentary reforms have been mounted to reduce the penal system's harsher sentences, but they are not binding on the country's independent judiciary.
Wait....what?
not binding on the country's independent judiciary.
Once more?
not binding on the country's independent judiciary.
They are killing people with fucking stones! Who thinks that is a just punishment? Religious fanatics who believe every word of their holy book is true, other than the parts that don't let them stone people to death, rape their own wives, and in general be self-righteous pricks. Fuck parliamentary reforms, fuck independent judiciaries. Religion is the issue here. Yeah, it is batshit insane religion, but it is still religion. No change is going to come until the underlying cause is dealt with, and that requires dragging Iran kicking and screaming into at least the 20th century.
They whipped a woman, 90 times, for acting in a film. Not a porn. Not a snuff film. Not even a breast filled teen comedy. It was a film with a message, a point, and no matter how much the Iranian authorities dislike the point, they proved it with their actions.
Let me be clear.
There is no justification possible for whipping a woman. There is no justification possible for whipping a dog, let alone a human. This isn't about a film, just as the stonings aren't about gay sex or adultery. It is about a patriarchal religion taken to extremes by men who have lost all touch with actual ethics and morality, refusing to accept the passing of time and the end of male values uber alles attempting to put uppity women in their place and GLBT people back in the closet through fear and violence.
Patriocentric theocracies have no place in the modern world. People are not property. Women are not your slaves, your wives are not sperm receptacles, girls are not fuck machines, and no matter how hard they make you, gays are not temptations sent by the devil.
If God exists, and agrees with Iran, I would rather burn in hell.
*sigh*
At least it could never happen in the United States.
The Constitution Restoration Act of 2004 and 2005
and
According to Gary North, women who have abortions should be publicly executed, "along with those who advised them to abort their children." Rushdoony concludes: "God's government prevails, and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them." Reconstructionists insist that "the death penalty is the maximum, not necessarily the mandatory penalty." However, such judgments may depend less on Biblical Principles than on which faction gains power in the theocratic republic. The potential for bloodthirsty episodes on the order of the Salem witchcraft trials or the Spanish Inquisition is inadvertently revealed by Reconstructionist theologian Rev. Ray Sutton, who claims that the Reconstructed Biblical theocracies would be "happy" places, to which people would flock because "capital punishment is one of the best evangelistic tools of a society."
and
For connoisseurs of surrealism on the American right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for advocating positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary." Among Reconstructionism's highlights, the article cited support for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards." The Rev. Rushdoony fired off a letter to the editor complaining that the article had got his followers' views all wrong: They didn't intend to put drunkards to death.
Ah, yes, accuracy does count. In a world run by Rushdoony followers, sots would escape capital punishment--which would make them happy exceptions indeed. Those who would face execution include not only gays but a very long list of others: blasphemers, heretics, apostate Christians, people who cursed or struck their parents, females guilty of "unchastity before marriage," "incorrigible" juvenile delinquents, adulterers, and (probably) telephone psychics. And that's to say nothing of murderers and those guilty of raping married women or "betrothed virgins." Adulterers, among others, might meet their doom by being publicly stoned
Yep. Could never happen here.
