I quote the following from Mark Steyn’s column in today’s (March 26, 2006) Orange County Register (his column dealt with the threatened death penalty for a Moslem convert to Christianity):
“In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of `suttee’ — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Gen. Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: ‘You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.’”
