The moral underpinnings of a liberal democracy that we all take for granted...

The BBC tells the very sad tale of a 16-year-old girl, Atefah Sahaaleh, in Iran executed for removing her veil in an Islamic court...

Execution of a Teenage Girl...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/5217424.stm

Documents filed with Iran's Supreme Court of Appeal reported her as 22 and guilty of "crimes against chastity"...

There are many girls like Atefah in the United States and the world over...

Atefah's mother died when Atefah was 4 or 5...her father, subsequently, became addicted to drugs, from grief, presumably...Atefah was sent to live with her grandparents who were reported to have shown her no affection...Atefah became noticed for wandering the streets of her small, traditional town of Neka, and after run-ins with, lashings and jail time from police for being found in the presence of a boy, Atefah became involved with an abusive man three times her age...

When she was arrested a fourth time after a local petition described her as a "source of immorality" and a "terrible influence on local schoolgirls," Atefah reported her relationship with her older suiter as sexually abusive...when she believed her case was hopeless, she tore off her veil in outrage...

Her judge, Haji Rezai, sentenced her to execution by hanging...

The sad tragedy of more traditional, theocratic societies like Iran is not that they do not suffer similar problems of the West, as many both in those countries and in Western societies who romanticize theocracies would have us believe...

The sad tragedy is that those problems do exist...and that they are just far less honest about the moral consequences of their inhumanity, so concerned are they with proving their moral worth, despite their harsher more barbaric treatment of girls like Atefah...

For all of the open faults in liberal democracies, the moral underpinnings of a liberal democracy that soften and moderate such ugliness are the clearest indication of what we take for granted in the democratic West...as much as we perpetually underestimate and undervalue the freedom and the thoughtfulness and the compassion and the wisdom that make this so...

And it is that softness and moderation that allows us to take responsibility for our injustices and inhumanities as we begin to feel less defensive and face more honestly our complicity in injustice...

It is liberal democracy that is the basis for our highest ideals of justice and decency...we just forget...

Until we see just how bad the world can be without such moral underpinnings...

Love,
Ben