There are a lot of catholics named Jesse, or Jesus (familiar = Chuy).
I don’t know about other christians.
Come to think of it, though, my adult daughter named her chihuahua Chuy, and her good friend and neighbor (a mexican woman) expressed a little discomfort with it. Funny thing is, she actually named the dog Chewie, cause chewed up so much stuff.
Nobody killed anyone.
I work for a giant oil company. My son-in-law is a tool pusher in a rig in Wyoming. I’m from Bakersfield, an old time oil area. I have a strong financial stake in oil. That colors my opinion of the oil business.
How about you? any connections to oil? I sense something, but could easily be wrong. 
But, I do believe that financial pressure might give the Saudis a pause. They lose a lot of their precious prohibitions when away from Saudi, I hear.
Hey Paul in Saudi, I’ve been following the story in the Arab News. They have been all over it. Granted it’s the English Newspaper for Saudi Arabia. But when I first moved to Saudi the Arab News was notorious for censoring the comic page!
Me? I have no ties to oil outside my temporary status as a commuter. I don’t disagree with getting off of it - like I have said several times though, I just don’t see it as a panacea for the people that live there. Not like I have any fantastic solutions though. We have economic sanctions against Iran and women are still being stoned as part of sharia.
You are young, huh? 
There is no panacea for that mess.
I know there isn’t. It doesn’t make me give a shit less about it, though. I have had personal experiences and interactions in my lifetime that make me get a bit worked up about women (well, all people, really) being punished in this fashion. It’s a particularly frustrating preoccupation of mine, you could say.
Una
No, kids are exempt. Certainly the pre-teen crowd is. Older than that, it gets iffy, depending on what kind of asshole is investigating things. I think this was mostly politics, allowing the local religious cops to attack one of those “evil Westerners.” As far as naming someone Mohammed, I think that’s more a hope than anything else. I’m not sure what would happen if an adult named a teddy bear like that. I’m sure they’d never let anyone know about it so that’s hard to answer.
I will say that I couldn’t see this happening in Saudi, strange as that may seem considering what we’re pitting/debating in this thread.
The woman in Sudan is in a tough spot. The religious cops probably have their own places to keep prisoners and that may very well be where she’s being kept. The ones in Saudi certainly have facilities to keep people. The government probably wishes the whole thing would go away. OTOH, they have ceded so much authority to the ultra-religious that now they’re stuck. If they allow this woman to actually be executed, they know there will be some kind of shitstorm. OTOH, if they release her, they will stand accused of siding with the wicked Westerners against their religion. Most people outside the area have no idea what kind of problems that could make for the local leaders.
Regards
Testy
If I may nitpick, Mohammad isn’t the name of Islam’s deity, but only of that deity’s prophet. As far as I’ve been able to tell, god, in Islam, is called simply, “God” as He is by Christians and Jews and is explicitly the God of Abraham and Isaac, the same as the deity worshipped by Christians and Jews.
Whatever you want to call him/her/it, I can’t see that entity approving of some of the nonsense that’s carried on his name.
fine, change diety to main prophet. Same deal. Remember the outrage when Sinead O’Connor merely tore up a picture of the Pope? she got death threats IIRC. people often have strong reactions to their religious icons (and to head off additional nitpicks -add in dietys, prophets etc).
The main difference is that apparently she’s in a country where the official state laws are also involved. In which case I have to echo Testy who questioned who trained/sent her. When traveling to different countries, it’s really important to investigate the laws.
I agree! Does anyone else remember the flap with the American missionaries in Afghanistan shortly before the 9/11 attacks? These people, to give them all benefit of the doubt, had gone into Kabul intending to proseltyze for their version of Christianity. And the Taliban, which had (whatever other faults one can lay at their feet) openly told the world that they were enforcing some rather draconian laws against apostacy, rounded them up, tried and sentenced them.
And their families were bleating about how this was a violation of the missionaries’ free speech rights. Which it was. But the Taliban never had recognized those rights in the first place. I really had to wonder, given how the families were behaving, whether the missionaries actually realized they were going to a nation with different laws, many of them set up to punish the very things they were planning to do.
Um, isn’t another difference that in O’Connor’s case there was no room for doubt that offence was intended?
s/diet/deit/
OtakuLoki
This kind of thing drives me wild. We get a lot of people over here, mostly from the US, that run afoul of the local laws either knowingly or otherwise, and immediately start screaming about how their civil rights are being violated. They act like they’re back in the States. Sometimes it’s embarrassing to think that they don’t even realize that the whole legal system and society is different than what they’re used to. We try to tell the FNGs that “you ain’t got no civil rights” before they get into trouble but it rarely sinks in until they get a demo and spend the night in jail.
Regards
Testy
An update bump…the woman has been pardonedby King Abdullah.
Right.
All hail the benevolent leader!
Quote from the linked NY Times article: “Canada called it barbaric.”
Good on Canada. That’s what I call a shoot-from-the-hip admonishment. How differently would the same strong wording have been seen coming from the Bush admin? Would there have been instead a headline stating “Bush Calls Islam Barbaric”?
That may be true. But we don’t whip rape victims to death.
This isn’t the first time our Northern Neighbors have embarassed us in world affairs.
I’d like to see “Bush joins Canada in condemnation of the barbaric actions of Islam in Saudi.”
But then we’d have to explain some of our own actions. :rolleyes:
Peace,
mangeorge
OK, now I’m really confused. **Boyo Jim’s ** link above says
The victim in the case, known only as the ‘‘Girl of Qatif’’ after her hometown in eastern Saudi Arabia, was in a car with a high school friend in 2006 when they were attacked and raped by seven men.
Yet she was punished for being alone in a car with a man. So did the rapists rape the man, too? If so, why aren’t they getting 7000 lashes like the men linked on page one? Or is this just sloppy reporting?
I found several stories that seem to confirm both of the victims were raped, and this one saying both victims were sentenced to 90 lashes. She appealed, and her sentence was increased.
I found a couple of articles saying there were not enough witnesses, and no confessions, to sentence the attackers to the normal penalty for rape, which is death.
‘‘The king always looks into alleviating the suffering of the citizens when he becomes sure that these verdicts will leave psychological effects on the convicted people, though he is convinced and sure that the verdicts were fair,’’ al-Jazirah quoted al-Sheik as saying.
Translation: Holy shit, but we got some bad publicity!