Let Me Explain It To You

My newspaper just taught me a lot about Honor Killings. Now that I understand how it works I can better understand where they are coming from... Or can I?

The time “honored” practice of Honor Killing is big in the Middle East.

Did I just hear you say you think we can change their minds about Honor Killings if we only opened a dialog on the subject with them? Come on now, this has been going on for hundreds of years. Instead what we ought to do is to pattern our system of laws after theirs and then they will surely like us.

The following bullet points lay out The Law of the Land in Pakistan...

• A 25 year old woman was recently stoned to death for marrying the person whom she wanted to marry and not the person her family wanted her to marry. 
• She was stoned to death outside the courthouse that had under consideration her appeal to be allowed to marry whomever she wanted to marry.
• Her father, two brothers and her former fiancé (her cousin) were among the dozen or so people who stoned her to death.
• In honor killings most of the time the women’s killers are her own family.
• The only one arrested was her father who says he was required to kill her as a matter of honor because a woman marrying her own choice brings dishonor on her family.
• More than 1,000 Pakistani women are killed each year by their families in honor killings.
• Pakistani Law allows the family to select someone to do the killing and then it also allows the family to forgive the killer.

(I do wish you would stop thinking I make these things up.)

Now do you better understand what we are up against if we try to engage them in a dialog to convince them that our way of doing things is right and theirs is wrong?

An official in my newspaper article is quoted as saying, “This is a huge flaw in the law”. The Smartfella, up until this point, thought all of the people in the middle east were named Mohammed. Now I find myself thinking there is at least one named “Sherlock” because I am thinking, “Flaw in the law? ... No Chit, Sherlock”.

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In the third paragraph above I said, “We need to pattern our culture after theirs”. Allow me to give you a few examples...

• Drivers ought to be allowed by law to run red lights if they have a burning desire to eat a burrito and they can prove to the court that that’s where they were headed when they ran the red light. 
• It is OK to have murdered someone if there were exactly five eyewitnesses to the murder. 
• A person should not have to pay any income taxes if he can prove that there was at least one person in the Good Ole USofA that makes more money than that person makes.

OK I admit that the three bullets above are silly, unworkable and do not make any sense at all. I still think we ought to give them a try because there is not a smidgen of evidence that they would not work since none of the three ideas have ever been tried.

If the Good Ole USofA is completely destroyed as a result of this experiment in foolishness, I am in full agreement that we ought to declare the whole experiment extreme silly poppycock and go back to before the country had been destroyed and make like it had never been destroyed.

I call all of this a Congressional Mulligan and, if Congressional Mulligans are not in the Constitution, they certainly ought to be.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

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