While many of my posts mock American politicians for their foolish, short-sighted, and corrupt choices, I’m still very happy to be a citizen of the United States. Or, to be more accurate, I’m glad that I live in a nation that is part of Western civilization.
Consider what it would be like to live in Iran, where the government executes people for victimless crimes. Here’s part of a report from AFP.
Iranian courts on Sunday sentenced two people to death for running porn sites, prosecutor general Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said, quoted on the Islamic republic’s official IRNA news agency. …Last December, Canada expressed concern over the reported death sentence handed down to an Iranian-born Canadian resident for allegedly designing an adult website. …Malekpour was detained in Iran after returning in 2008 to visit his ailing father. He was sentenced to death in December. The Netherlands froze contacts with Tehran after Saturday’s hanging of an Iranian-Dutch woman for drug smuggling, having initially been arrested for taking part in anti-government protests.
Iran also executes gay people, so the thugs running the government get bent out of shape about all sorts of private, consensual acts.
And let’s not forget that these nutjobs apparently are on the verge of getting nuclear weapons.
I rarely comment on foreign policy, and I don’t pretend to know what, if anything, should be done about Iran. My libertarian instincts tell me that any Western intervention would backfire. That being said, the world might be a safer place if Iran’s nuclear weapons program was disabled by an Israeli strike.
The best outcome, at least to my untrained eye, would be a domestic revolution. Some people fear this means instability, but Anne Applebaum persuasively argues in today’s Washington post that the uncertainty of change is better than the certainty of oppression. She’s commenting on Egypt’s turmoil, but I think her message has wide application. As such, one can only hope that the Iranian people rise up and overthrow the current regime. At which point, maybe gay Persians should be allowed to decide an appropriate punishment for the ousted tyrants.
