I wonder if Elena Kagan knows about Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.
Ms. Ashtiani is about to be stoned. That’s where they bury you up to your chest and hurl rocks at you until you die. The rocks can’t be too big. You see, this is real torture, religion-of-peace torture. It’s the kind that happens every day but that Democrats prefer not to talk about. With stoning (or “lapidation” as the press gently call it on those rare occasions when it is mentioned at all), the ordeal must not end too quickly. Otherwise, it might not make the right impression, as it were, on the victim — the sinner — and the community at large.
Had the solicitor general heard about Ms. Ashtiani’s plight, one imagines, she’d have told her to get herself to the nearest courthouse and seek the protection of the law. Alas, it is pursuant to the law that this barbarity will take place. The stoning of this 43-year-old mother of two has been ordered by a court in her native Iran, where the only legal code is Allah’s law, sharia. It is the Islamic sentence for adultery, the crime to which Ashtiani confessed after serial beatings by her interrogators.
During her a stint at the Clinton White House, we now know, Ms. Kagan struck the pose of a champion of women’s rights — at least if you weren’t an unborn girl. So fierce was her devotion to the cause of “reproductive freedom” that she subverted science in the service of abortion on demand — specifically, to preserve the partial-birth abortion procedure,
which exceeds even stoning in its ghastliness. She then went on to Harvard Law School where, as dean, she became the champion of sharia.
Not of stoning and other grotesque penalties, of course — nothing so obviously offensive. To hear progressives tell it, we can do nice, clean, friendly sharia, just like we do nice, clean, friendly Islam. “Lapidations,” they will tell you, are no different from jihadist suicide bombings: outmoded vestiges of a long-forgotten time. Except they’re not. They are undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture, and they are happening today, with frequency, wherever sharia reigns. That is because the “moderate Islam” progressives like to banter about is a mirage in search of a cogent set of principles. There is no moderate Islam that can compete with the mainstream, sharia Islam. Thus the crimes and punishments, in all their ghoulishness, endure.
‘PROFOUND MORAL INJUSTICE’At Harvard, Dean Kagan’s gay-rights activism was as limitless as her pro-abortion activism had been. She banned on-campus military recruitment. Doing so was a flagrant violation of federal law, but she rationalized it by her moral outrage over the armed forces’ “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Once again striking the leftist’s brave “speaking truth to power” pose, she
lambasted DADT as “a profound wrong — a moral injustice of the first order.”
It was a phony courage, the kind where you rattle your “social justice” saber in front of a pretend dragon, knowing your friends will cheer. The kind where you know it won’t cost you anything. The military wasn’t going to do anything to Kagan, and DADT wasn’t a mere military standard. It was a statute enacted by a solidly Democratic Congress with the approval of President Clinton. Shortly after he signed DADT, President Clinton offered Kagan a position on the White House staff. Did she grandstand? Did she speak truth to power with a scoffing denunciation about the profound moral injustice Clinton had endorsed? Not exactly. She accepted the gig in a heartbeat, ditching a coveted tenured professorship at the University of Chicago’s law school, one of America’s finest.
Continue here to page 2 of the National Review 
