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Saudi Arabia to execute woman for 'witchcraft'

I saw this headline last Thursday and was going to comment on it but it was Valentine's Day and then the weekend was on us and I just didn't want to end the week with a story like this. I was frankly just too damn dumbfounded and depressed that something like this was still possible.

Now to be fair we had our own little brush with Witch trials here in America. A little brush that ended with 19 men and women dead from hanging, an 80 year old man pressed to death under heavy stones, and several others dead in prison waiting for their turn on the gallows. But all that was so long ago. After all it's been 316 years. This is 2008 there couldn't possibly be any similarities between what happen then and this "modern day" case. I mean, come on, the Salem Witch Trials took place in a horribly oppressive Puritan religious environment where the word of God ruled law. In the 1600's women had few rights, were subservient to men and were easy targets. The accusers had either personal "issues" with the accused, stood to gain from their conviction and execution (usually land), or both. See? Not at all similar. The Middle East is nothing like that. There has to be more to the story. I have no doubt that logic and reason were applied to this case. I'm sure they have in their possession hard evidence (well, not from the impotent guy). Evidence like an irrefutable modern scientific test. A test like throwing her into water to see if she floats, or checking to see if she weighs as much as a duck. One couldn't argue with that. You'd have to conclude that she was guilty.

The woman in the story was convicted based on a "coerced" confession (I looked that up in my legal bullshit dictionary and it said coerced confession was defined as torture, see for example "waterboarding"). Her conviction was also based on statements of "witnesses" (defined in this case as ass-backwards MEN who think that women are sub-human, worthless chattel) who claimed the woman had "bewitched" them. Why, one of these MEN(?) even became impotent after being "bewitched". Imagine that. I'm thinkin' he was having impure thoughts and wanting to act on them with this woman and she either told him where to go or agreed to help him out only to find that thinking about it was all he could do. To either hide embarrassment or avoid anyone finding out what they were up to or to cast the blame on her when someone did find out, poof, she suddenly became a witch.

It might seem like I'm making light of this. While I am being a tad sarcastic, I don't find this subject at all funny. I am angry, horrified, disgusted and more than a little bit frightened. It's bad enough to feel like we're drifting backwards but this kind of thing is a harsh reminder that there are people out there slamming it into reverse and mashing the friggin' pedal. I want out of the car.