Your blog is a wonderful resource, perhaps especially for straight neocons like me. I check in intermittently, but always with the expectation — nearly always satisfied — that I’ll learn something I didn’t know before.
But you do your readers a disservice by simply linking to the gay UK blog from which you apparently learned of these hangings last week. First, in doing so you risk allowing your readers to treat a crime against two gay youngsters as simply that: A very public and barbarous crime against two gay men. I’d be surprised if I’m the only opponent of the Iranian regime who has often felt that the feelings we’ve long maintained against it were longer in theory than in experience. Just for example, it’s one thing for the State Department to forever keep Iran tops on its list of sponsors of terror; it’s another thing altogether to witness so vividly the revolting impulses that animate this and every radical Muslim opponent of civilization.
Second, there’s a third photograph on the official Iranian website of the two young men moments before their deaths, being interviewed — yes, interviewed — presumably by somebody with official Iranian press credentials. This photograph, on a state-sanctioned website, of two clearly devastated human beings being hounded by a caricature of a Western-style press is among the most wretched and haunting images I’ve seen. Moreover, we see in this photograph not two young gay men, but two men, simply, facing death at the hands of a regime that, it turns out, is really quite deserving of civilized loathing.
That so few of us today truly hate the Iranian government — hate it reflexively and without reservation — speaks perhaps to the easy-going nature of our easy-going western lives. But please, let us never forget that while the Iranian regime is certainly anti-gay — and you are right to emphasize this truth — it is also, and even more significantly, anti-human. And this is the deeper truth to which the photographs of these young men’s deaths bear witness. Peter Greenman
posted by Judith
The Dish 