Gay Activists

At TNR online (registration required), how America's gay activists are giving Iran a free pass:

Last month, when Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to New York to visit the United Nations, he was greeted by thousands of Iranian protesters from the United States and overseas. America's gay and lesbian activists did not join in. Ireland [gay journalist Doug Ireland], who has tirelessly reported abuses against gays and lesbians in Iran, was livid; he wrote that the failure of gay activists to protest Ahmadinejad represented the "the death of gay activism."

But Ireland was only half right. When it comes to the oppression of gays and lesbians in Muslim countries, gay activism hasn't died; it never really existed. Gay activists have used two types of excuses to justify their failure to aggressively mobilize for the rights of gay Muslims--moral and strategic. The moral argument is that Americans are in no position to criticize Iranians on human rights--that it would be wrong to campaign too loudly against Iranian abuses when the United States has so many problems of its own. Then, there are two strategic rationales: that it is better to work behind the scenes to bring about change in Iran; and that gay rights groups should conserve their resources for domestic battles.

The strategic rationales are not especially compelling, but it is the moral argument that is particularly troubling, because it suggests that some gay and lesbian leaders feel more allegiance to the relativism of the contemporary left than they do to the universality of their own cause. Activists are more than willing to condemn the homophobic leaders of the Christian right for campaigning against gay marriage; but they are weary of condemning Islamist regimes that execute citizens for being gay. Something has gone terribly awry...

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), told me that when George W. Bush was a governor, "there wasn't a peep about the execution of juveniles in Texas. ... Let's not have double standards because it's a different part of the world." Foreman, who worked within the U.S. prison system for ten years, says that the United States still engages in "barbaric behavior" at home. "If we think that psychological torture and physical torture and rape and inhumane conditions are not part of our own criminal justice system, than people don't have a clue about the reality of our nation, let alone the conditions of Guantánamo, let alone the sanctions to keep prisoners in Afghanistan." To Foreman, it would be hypocritical for U.S. gays and lesbians to criticize Iran if they haven't been criticizing America's own prison system all along. Faisal Alam, founder of the Al-Fatiha Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit for LGBT Muslims, also used the news of the Iran hangings to point a finger at the United States. "While we condemn the executions of gay teens in Iran, we must remember that until March of this year, our own country was one of only five in the world that executed juvenile offenders," Alam wrote in an August Washington Blade column.

Foreman's and Alam's comparisons are specious. America and Iran may both have flawed systems of punishing criminals; and, to be sure, juvenile executions are an illiberal practice, whether carried out in Houston or Tehran. But only Iran convicts those criminals simply because of their sexual orientation. That's a pretty important distinction. Furthermore, U.S. gay rights organizations don't have an inherent responsibility to take up the crusade for the rights of juvenile criminals; they do, however, have a responsibility to speak up when gays are executed simply for being gay. There's nothing admirable about using one injustice as blinders for another.

Gay activists in the UK, like the irrepressible Peter Tatchell, have a better record.