Gary North: Call Your Office!

Nine face stoning death in Iran

Under Iran’s strict penal code, men convicted of adultery should be buried up to their waists and women up to their chests for stoning. The stones used should not be large enough to kill the person immediately.

There seems to be some controversy in the stoning community. The stoners in Iran want it done slowly, focusing on the agony and suffering of the stoned, whereas the stoner Gary North (sorta famous for his very influential and prescient prediction of the end of the world due to the “Y2K” disaster, which, well, sort of didn’t happen, but..whatever) and his colleagues favor the economic aspect (low-cost and ready-to-hand implements and the creation of public benefits), as Walter Olson explained in Reason:

Reconstructionists provide the most enthusiastic constituency for stoning since the Taliban seized Kabul. “Why stoning?” asks North. “There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost.” Thrift and ubiquity aside, “executions are community projects–not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do `his’ duty, but rather with actual participants.” You might even say that like square dances or quilting bees, they represent the kind of hands-on neighborliness so often missed in this impersonal era. “That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes,” North continues, “indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians.” And he may be right about that last point, you know.

Maybe we could hold a contest, with Gary North and his friends volunteering to test the various techniques on each other. Better yet, invite the extremist Iranian mullahs to take part, as North and Co. consider them infidels (thus deserving of death, like gay people and adulterers), and the extremist mullahs return the compliment. Talk about a complementarity of interests! And the rest of the human race could live in peace without them.

(Let us hope that the voices of reason in that country prevail and that the nine Iranians are spared. The cruelty of the regime there — not to mention their destructive economic policies — is creating discontent and some hope for a liberal alternative. The last best hope of the regime is for the US to attack them with military force, which would create a surge of nationalist support to add to the dwindling reserves of religious fanatacism.)