Sticks and Stones...... and Enriched Uranium?

It’s hard to be an American sometimes… Not because our country is one of the worst socially, economically, or from a development standpoint, but from the perspective of a citizen of planet Earth, watching fellow citizens from other countries go through ridiculous, unfair punishments that do not fit the crimes they have supposedly committed; the Iranian woman sentenced to stoning for adultery, the Australian woman who narrowly escaped the death penalty but was sentenced to 20 years in a Bali prison for smuggling drugs even though it was proven that drug smugglers were present and hiding their illegal wares in the bags of unsuspecting passengers the day the woman was caught… These are the kind of stories that make my skin crawl as an American, because even though our country has its imperfections, at least I will never face the possibility of being stoned to death. At least in America, you have the right to a kind-of fair trial judged by a jury of your sort-of peers.

It is mind boggling that the same Iranian government that accepts stoning as a sentence for the crime of adultery receives support from the international community when it wants to buy enriched uranium (supposedly for medical purposes). Obviously, there are cultural differences at work here, but at some point (hopefully when the words “enriched uranium” come in to play) we have to ask ourselves, can a country that is willing to stone someone to death for adultery in the year 2010 be trusted with the ingredients of a nuclear weapon?

Let’s examine this critically. In Iran, a woman can be stoned to death for allegedly committing adultery, but not only that, a woman can also be sentenced to death for fending off the attacks of a rapist. So obviously, according to this school of thought, a woman is not the equal of a man. If it can become a widely accepted cultural norm to think of a woman as a lesser grade of human being, it could be just as easy to think of an African, Latino, or Asian person as a person of lesser value as well.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, if your country wants to be trusted with a do-it-yourself WMD kit, please at least do the bare minimum and prove that you have the morality to treat your own countrymen and women with the level of respect that all human beings deserve regardless of gender, religion, or race.