Rename Cesar Chavez schools and streets to honor Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei?
Cesar Chavez is in the news this week, e.g., “Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years” (NYT) and now Democrat-run states such as California have tons of Cesar Chavez schools and streets to rename. ChatGPT estimates 43-45 public schools and as many as 100 streets are named after a vegetarian who died at age 66 of “natural causes” for which there is likely no ICD-10 code (maybe add W50.5 “sex with energetic teenagers” or W50.6 “sex with teens who volunteered to help a progressive cause”?).
What about renaming all of these schools and streets to honor a hero to modern-day Californians? Suppose there were a person heroically standing up to an illegal war, unafraid of death, and leading a society that is a City on a Hill to Californians? From March 1, 2026, Gavin Newsom characterizes the U.S. war on Iran as “illegal”:
From today, Gavin Newsom in his official capacity offers a hearty “Assalamualaikum, California!”:
A few months ago, a Hamas leader might have been the natural choice. However, except for occasional swipes at Israel for “genocide” or “apartheid“, the California righteous seem to have forgotten about their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in “Palestine”. The Islamic Republic of Iran is the model now and, certainly, nobody observes Ramadan more piously and peacefully than an Iranian ayatollah. Nobody stands up to Donald Trump’s aggression more bravely than an Iranian politician. The natural choices for new names, then, are “Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei High School”, “Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei Avenue”, and similar.
Separately, what did Cesar Chavez do, according to the NYT?
The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.
Ms. Rojas said she was 12 when Mr. Chavez first touched her inappropriately, groping her breasts in the same office where he’d meet with Ms. Murguia. When Ms. Rojas was 15, he arranged to have her stay at a motel during a weekslong march through California, she said, and had sexual intercourse with her — rape, under state law, because she was not old enough to consent.
The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.
One night during the winter of 1966 in Delano, Calif., she said, Mr. Chavez drove her out to a secluded grape field, parked and raped her inside the vehicle. Ms. Huerta, who was 36 at the time, said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her. She also described an earlier encounter in August 1960, when she said she felt pressured to have sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California.
Note that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tahrir al-Wasila wrote that it was acceptable for a middle-aged man to have sex with a 9-year-old, just as Muhammad did, within the context of a marriage (but younger than 9 years old is forbidden or, perhaps, 8 years and 9 months). Chavez, in other words, wouldn’t have been breaking the law in Iran so long as he married the girls described in the article. (“While marriageable age is defined at 13 years for girls and 15 years for boys, there is no specific age limit for marriage in Iran and marriage is possible at any age” says “The trend of girl child marriage in Iran based on national census data” (2020).)
Related:
- Theodicy question: Why didn’t Allah protect the Islamic Republic of Iran from attack by infidels? (“Iran may yet provide us with a desperately‐needed model of humane governance for a third‐world country,” said the New York Times in 1979 regarding Ayatollah Khomeini’s incoming “Islamic government”)
