A controversy arose last week over whether it was OK for Florida T-shirt manufacturers David and Goliath (yes, that's their real name) to sell T-shirts bearing the image of a hapless cartoon boy that resembles a bedraggled Charlie Brown and bears the message: "Boys are stupid. Throw rocks at them."

Understandably, not everyone thought that was hilariously funny. Critics pointed out that universal outrage would be the result if the T-shirt's message had targeted girls.

The folks at David and Goliath said that the message about throwing rocks at boys was just a joke. Where were those standing up for the rights of the wearer to free speech?

Sorry. The T-shirt not only isn't really funny, it doesn't inspire a call to wave the free speech banner, either.

There's just too much that remains unfunny about the inability of some men and women to work out their differences without resorting to violence.

And although no laws in America allow working out those gender-related issues by hurling rocks at the other person, such is not the case everywhere.

In Afghanistan, half a world and several centuries away, women are only a few years removed from the the fundamentalist Islamic regime of the Taliban. Under Taliban rule, women caught in adultery or premarital sex were routinely sentenced to death by stoning. Two years after the fall of the Taliban, a

10-year-old tape of a woman seen on television (gasp) singing is causing a controversy.

Businessman Mohammed Mustaf Zadran said, "We believe in female rights but under Islamic law, women are for the house, not for display or show outside."

The law is not on the songbird's side. The first deputy of Afghanistan's Supreme Court, Fazal Ahmad Manawi, said "Singing with music is not allowed for women in Islam and the Ministry of Information and Culture should respect the judiciary."

Perhaps this is understandable in a nation that, until the fall of the Taliban, routinely saw women being sentenced to death by stoning, even if few such sentences were actually carried out.

Nevertheless, the fact that stoning was so recently considered justice anywhere should be enough to chill the notion that it's good fun to identify anyone as the suitable target of rocks.