GScholz
I beleive I understand the foundation for the question/construct you are posing to us. Regardless of our moral foundations and how we have read this article, or read into the article, the girl violated a cultural law. The law was exercised and punishment was enacted.<---This is the simple of it if we leave out our moral outrage.
In the first 3/5 of the 20th century the United States allowed business as usual in the south east toward african americans. Essentially an issue of states rights as I remember, rather than federal civil rights. It took the moral outrage of a non-southeastern voting block to convince Kennedy's involvment by a trumping of states rights with elevating the treatment of african americans to a federal civil rights status as a protected class of citizen. A minority.
In Iran I beleive their classes are by religious sect, rather than ethnicity. As such how the girl was delt with is an internal affair, and not the business of the world community. If the Iranian Mullas suddenly decide to have all non-ethnic persons inside of Iran to be gassed from today on, that opens the door to external intervention.
Just because of how law and punishment is metted out differently from ours by another culture, does not morally give us the right to impose our culture's values by War. Saddam qualifyed for War by gassing Kurds and filling mass graves with his own dissenters. Iraq and Germany have a parrallel. The 20th century showed the United States that we did not always get what we thought we wanted by helping, manipulating, or Attacking a regim. Just because we can stomp a country flat in the 21st century for persuing religion\LAW differently than us, it is not a moral justification.
How the 16 year old girl was delt with is reprehnsible. I have lived in the middle east. The judge had her executed through the legal system for something as minescule as his ego. My judeo\christian morality says he is wrong. Fataly so. My personal inclination toward that individual brings to mind images of wood chippers and squeeling pigs.
So with the afor admitted moral feelings, I nor the U.S.A. have the right to declair War on Iran. That judge's actions is a matter for the Iranian people to decide if they have had enough of.
