homosexual
09/25/2007
Iran is Gay-Free, Says President Ahmadinejad
Everyone has their own way of dealing with unpleasant facts about the world. Some of us confront them head-on. Some of us snark about them on the Internet while doing nothing substantive to fix the problem. Some of us drink heavily. (Some of us do two out of three.) But there aren't a lot of adults who admit to the "nah nah nah I don't know what you're talking about" approach. It's fun to know that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one of them.
During the Iranian president's controversial Q&A at Columbia University, he was asked point-blank about the treatment of homosexuals in his country. And apparently, it's fine -- because there are no homosexuals in Iran. Cue the laughter of the student body. But he's not joking.
I suppose what he actually means to say is that the openly gay lifestyle is completely non-existent in Iran, which is true. This is because persecution is rampant and public hangings of the openly homosexual are not unheard-of, given that all penetrative sexual acts between men are punishable by death. Given what that says about the state of human rights there, maybe I'll take a cue from Mahmoud, and try avoidance for a little while.
