The Gay Gulag in Iran....

And gay pride marches focus on Israel.....

In September 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stood before an audience of college students and faculty at Columbia University and made the perverse claim that there were no homosexuals in Iran. ”In Iran we do not have this phenomenon, I don’t know who has told you that we have it,” he said. Ahmadinejad’s comments, made in a year in which Iran had executed 200 people, homosexuals among them, made shock waves around the globe. Yet the absurdity of the official denial may also have been unintentionally salutary, spotlighting as it did the terrible plight of homosexuals in the Islamic Republic.

There is a good reason that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship denies the existence of gays inside the country. An honest acknowledgment of reality would force the authorities to acknowledge that Iranian gays are regularly marginalized, harassed, tortured, and executed. Sometimes, they are forced into gender-altering operations. Ahmadinejad’s claim also called attention to the hypocrisy of the international community on the issue of gay rights in Iran. President Ahmadinejad’s absurd claim received overwhelming disapproval, yet when Iranian homosexuals are routinely abused and lawfully executed simply for their sexual preferences, that same international community, and the “progressive” Left that claims to champion gay rights, are deafeningly silent.

More recently, hundreds of thousands of Americans protested to overturn California’s Proposition 8, the legislation introduced on the California ballot in November of 2008 limiting the definition of a legal marriage to exclude same-sex unions. The measure passed and incited protests and demonstrations across California and the rest of the nation. Homosexual couples fervently began to file lawsuits with California’s Supreme Court. Prior to election day, opponents raised $43.3 million in their campaign to turn down the proposition, making it the highest-funded campaign on any state ballot. It exceeded every campaign in the country except the presidential race.

As the progressive backlash against Prop 8 indicates, gay rights are a significant and sensitive issue for Americans, particularly on the Left. But despite passionate outbreaks by the gay community and others, Americans have been uncharacteristically uninterested in the brutal treatment of homosexuals in Iran. These advocates ardently insist that homosexuals have the right to wed, to raise children, and to live as others do, yet they turn a blind eye to the execution of gays in Iran simply for their sexual orientation.

Such executions are in fact enshrined in Iranian law, where homosexuality is punishable the death penalty. Human rights groups estimate that almost 4,000 gays have been executed since 1979, when the Islamic regime took power. Gays are arrested, beaten, tortured, and in most cases, hanged or even stoned.