As U.S. and
other global leaders prepare for
their May 23rd meeting with
Iranian officials on nuclear
issues, the regime in Tehran
continues to showcase its odious
nature by abusing the rights of
its people – particularly its
gays.
Gay rights
in Iran may seem disconnected to
Iran’s nuclear program but, in
at least one sense, they are
closely linked. That’s because
if this regime develops the
nuclear weaponry that it so
clearly seeks, it will be even
less susceptible to outside
pressure over its human rights
record.
Consequently, Iran’s homosexuals
have lots riding on global
efforts to force Tehran to
abandon its nuclear pursuit –
and we should keep that in mind
particularly today as the world
commemorates the International
Day Against Homophobia.
In recent
days, an Iranian court sentenced
four men from the town of Choram,
in the Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Admad
Province, to death by hanging
for the crime of sodomy,
according to a report earlier
this week in
Pink News.
“Although
being gay is not a crime based
on Iranian criminal law,” a gay
activist from Iran said, “this
is the most clear statement
against same sex-acts [sic] in
recent months,” adding that
“there were other of our men
hanged in [the] past five
months.”
So, while
Americans debate the morality
and political impact of
President Obama’s embrace of gay
marriage, an increasingly
dangerous U.S. adversary half a
world away continues to
slaughter its homosexual
citizens.
To be sure,
gays are hardly the only
disfavored group that faces the
wrath of a vicious regime. The
State Department’s most recent
annual report on human rights in
Iran is a sickening compilation
of murder, torture, rape,
beating, harassment, abduction,
jailing, and mock trials of
religious and ethnic minorities,
political dissidents, labor
leaders, lawyers, adulterers,
students, bloggers, and others.
Nevertheless, gays seem to hold
a position of particularly
unusual animus.
In late
2007, in response to a question
about gay rights in his country,
Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad famously, and
laughably, told an audience at
New York’s Columbia University
that his country had no gays. He
surely knew better then – and he
knows even better now – for at
least two reasons:
First, the
government over which he has
presided since 2005 had been
slaughtering gays from well
before his Columbia appearance.
The regime has executed more
than 4,000 gay men and women
since the Islamic Revolution
brought it to power in 1979,
according to a May 16th story on
the invaluable website Realite-EU,
and it has tortured and harassed
many others. By the time
Ahmadinejad took office, Iran
was already hanging gay teens.
Second, a
group of gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgender Iranians posted
videos of themselves on a
Facebook page late last year,
seeking to call attention to
their plight. Iranian gays from
both inside and outside the
country flocked to contribute to
the page, which they called “we
are everywhere.”
The
sentencing of the four men from
Choram capped off a busy few
weeks on the gay rights front in
Iran.
Late last
month,
Pink News reported that a
“gangster” known by the initials
CH M was hanged publicly in
Marwdasht, in Fars Province, for
engaging in “sodomy” with
another man. The Attorney
General of Marwdasht,
Gholamhossein Chamansara,
reportedly told the Iranian Fars
News Agency that the death
penalty came in response to a
“despicable/heinous act” that
contradicted Sharia law.
Around that
time, London’s
Guardian reported that an influential Iranian cleric who’s based in
the holy city of Qom suggested
that gays are inferior to dogs
and pigs because animals do not
engage in the “disgusting” act
of homosexuality.
Almost all
Iranian clerics have issues
fatwas that make homosexuality
punishable by death, the
Guardian reported. Moreover,
Iran’s parliament recently
approved legislation that will
subject the “active” participant
in consensual homosexual acts to
the added pleasure of a flogging
of 100 strokes.
For gay
women, the legal situation is
not much better than for gay
men. The punishment for gay sex
among women is 100 lashes, but a
woman convicted of lesbianism
for a fourth time faces the
death penalty.
Tehran’s
latest attacks on its gays
remind the rest of us that our
differences with the regime
extend far beyond the nuclear
issue. They also provide all the
reason we need to support the
democratic activists who seek to
replace this regime with a far
more humane one.
Lawrence J. Haas was
Communications Director and
Press Secretary for Vice
President Al Gore. He writes
widely about foreign and
domestic affairs and is the
author of 'Sound the Trumpet:
The United States and Human
Rights Promotion' (forthcoming
from Rowman & Littlefield).
