perfidy

This week, the Ministry was presented with one example of heartless circumstantial cruelty so profound, so overweeningly monstrous and yet so typical of the dim candles that humanity proudly calls their minds, that it takes center stage in a solo version of our celebrated series, "This Week in Exemplary Human Behavior."

Spotlight Iran: She is a woman severe mental handicaps. She has a mental age of eight. As a girl, she was sold into sex slavery by her mother and passed from pimp to pimp, bearing her first child at age nine and enduring repeated rapes and abuses in the years since. She is now nineteen years old and will bear the emotional and physical scars of her horrible ordeal for life.

In their infinite mercy, the mullahs controlling Iran have looked into their hearts and consulted their Korans and concluded that the only balm for this poor girl's tortured life is to sentence her to death for the crime of prostitution.

We of the Ministry, our hearts hardened and our faces perpetually ensneered, like sometimes to think we have plumbed the very limits of the chthonian depths of the perversity of the human spirit. It is stories like this, fresh outrages every week, that remind us that in truth we know jack shit.