No Witches were Burnt at Salem

Every so often I hear or read a comment  in which someone alludes to the burning of witches in colonial America.

Here is a comment I came across at the end of an NPR news story about a man in Atlanta who murdered his daughter because she wanted to divorce the husband of an arranged marriage.  

People in the Bible belt shouldn’t be so quick to jump on the “Islam is backwards” bandwagon. It was only three hundred years ago that local Protestants were burning “witches” and hanging adulterers for the same “honor” sins.

Ever read Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”?

Some clarification is called for. 

1. No witches were burnt in the United States

The witch trials that took place in Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693 undoubtedly stand as a shameful incident in American history, but they did not result in anyone’s being burnt at the stake. 

Arthur Miller (The Crucible) aptly used these events as an allegorical representation of the hysteria stirred up by Senator McCarthy between March and June of 1954. 

More than 150 people were arrested and imprisoned during the course of the witch trials and 29 were convicted. Fourteen women and five men were hanged. One man was crushed to death in the attempt to force him to make a plea of either guilty or not guilty.  No one was burnt to death.

2. Adulterers were not hanged for adultery

Admittedly being branded can’t be much fun, but at least it leaves the recipient alive. Some Puritan communities in New England are said to have branded the chests of adulterers with the letter “A.”  

3. No one is hanged for adultery in the Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 

Hawthorne’s novel relates the story of Hester Prynne who is punished for having a child out of wedlock. In lieu of being branded, she is required to wear a letter A prominently on her clothing. She is also publicly humiliated by being forced to stand on a platform all day. She was not hanged. Neither was her lover.

4. The practice of murdering women because they’ve “shamed” the men of their family by being raped or wanting out of an arranged marriage is not acceptable behavior.

Americans, so intolerant in many ways, generally bend over backwards to be accepting of different religious beliefs.  In the case of Islam, some accepting Americans are standing on their heads.

There’s no more one variety of “Islam” than there is one form of “Christianity.” Practitioners of both religions are able to extract every conceivable code of behavior from their holy books and insist that God wants it.  

The practice of so-called “honor killings” of women by some Muslim men is indefensible. It belongs to the savage and outdated notion that women are the chattel of men. Trying to explain it away as a “cultural difference” to be accommodated along with the hijab is lunacy.

It ought to be possible to welcome new Americans of any faith without condoning or accepting any and all cultural baggage they happen to bring with them.

American culture has its own standards of acceptable behavior. 

Gynocide is not acceptable for religious or any other “reasons.”