Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that “we don’t have homosexuals in Iran” should be taken, like his wish to wipe Israel off the map, as a serious expression of his regime’s ambitions. The gay-rights movement in America and the liberal press took his homosexual comments as either a joke or a demonstration of one man’s “intolerance.” This reaction exemplifies the catastrophic implications of the intersection of a nuclear Iran and an American Left that does not take Ahmadinejad seriously. Make no mistake: the Islamic republic has genocidal ambitions, and not only for those Israeli “occupiers.”
If any gay solidarity exists, then one of its key concepts should be defending the countries that permit homosexuals to live and confronting the regimes that do not. But on today’s PlanetOut, which calls itself “the leading global media company exclusively serving the gay community,” the website’s two headlines in bold have been “Lesbian parents just fine” and “The Queer world cup”; Ahmadinejad’s comments are relegated to an Associated Press link. The Human Rights Campaign, America’s “largest national gay civil rights organization,” issued a paragraph-length press release: “Ahmadinejad’s denial that there are gay people in Iran shows the extent to which he devalues the lives of the many citizens his government has and continues to violate.” These are not fighting words.
Adoption surveys, marriage rights, civil unions—all seem a trifling on a gay agenda when compared with Ahmadinejad’s dream. He must be confronted, and the only realistic plan that might save gay Iranians from Ahmadinejad’s genocidal aims is the Bush Doctrine. Such an approach advocates constitutional democracies in the greater Middle East that are attuned to their people’s most basic needs—which are not exporting terrorism, blaming problems on the Jews, or rounding up homosexuals.
In the Bush Doctrine lies the opportunity for gay men and lesbians in the Muslim world to have the chance at a life in their own lands—indeed, the chance to live. It is perplexing that those on the Left can demand marriage rights for homosexuals in America and at the same time so blithely ignore Iran’s gay “unpersons” and the hope that American intervention offers them. Instead, the “progressives” want to lessen our presence in the Middle East—even though the result will be the peristence of states in which terrorism is tolerated and gay people are not.
