Governments based on secular law have stopped trying behead people for religious reasons, just as they have (for the most part) stopped trying to justify slavery. It's almost enough to make one believe in the possibility of human progress, as America's Enlightenment-influenced founders did.

My guess is that Afghan President Hamid Karzai will intervene to overrule this decision, handed down by local judges (without a defense lawyer to represent the accused) in an area of Afghanistan where fundamentalist Islamist mullahs dominate law and culture. It seems that the 20-year-old student reporter, Perwiz Kambakhsh, distributed an article, published on the Internet, asking why Muslim men were allowed to have four wives while women were required to be monogamous (or risk the death penalty themselves). Karzai, a decent man walking a tightrope between his American patrons and the resurgent Taliban, responded quickly last year in another case, involving a man threatened with death for coverting to Christianity. The convert was hustled off to Rome as a refugee, which, if the Vatican had not been deprived of its civil authority in Italy in the late 19th century, would be a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire.

I leave it to Muslims to continue the debate about what shariah--Islamic law--actually says about freedom of speech. This interests me no more than quarrels between Orthodox Jews about whether a strict interpretation of Jewish law, halachah places women in an inferior legal position to men. (The answer is that it does.) I have no problem with people choosing to follow religious laws laid down by men two thousand, seven hundred, or a hundred years ago--as long as they don't expect others to abide by their rules. Human sacrifice, stoning women to death for adultery, and execution for blasphemy were all, at one time, sanctioned by unions of religion and government. Westerners have, for the most part, grown out of this sacral nonsense but it goes on in Islamist theocracies (or as, in the case of Afghanistan, in countries split between those who aspire to democratic government and those who believe in sentencing people to death for making fun of the inconsistencies in old books written by men).
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Do I think that values based on universal human rights are superior to values based on the right of self-appointed religious authorities to decide who lives and who dies? Absolutely. Do I think that that America in particular should answer for its own violations of human rights, such as equivocating on the torture of prisoners? Absolutely. But the fact that the West does not always live up to its own best ideals has nothing to do with with the question of whether human rights are being violated, on a vast and horrific scale, in societies where religion is the law.

I am sickened by phony multiculturalism, which, in the name of religious "tolerance," says that we ought not to criticize cultures or countries into which nearly every girl is born only to have her clitoris cut (Indonesia and parts of Africa) and where a young journalist can be sentenced to death for mockery of a man-made (and I do emphasize the word man religious law. The question of whether someone ought to be sentenced to death for exercising freedom of expression is no minor episode in the multicultural wars. It lies at the heart of the battle between those who believe in human rights and those who do not.

It would save so much time and suffering if these pusillanimous Islamic fundamentalists would read about the Bad Old Days of Christian theocracy in the West and draw appropriate conclusions. But I suppose that many books on western history's worst episodes would be considered blasphemous too. And people who believe in the rule of their form of religious law object only to theocracies based on another form of religious law.