Iran's Ahmadinejad: 'In Iran we don't have homosexuals'

Some people think the same way in America...

Many of the anti-gay groups here in America assert that there is no such thing as a homosexual.  For them, all people are born stright and choose to have sex with members of the same sex.  Our own American Taliban has much in common with the President of Iran.  Or, perhaps he just meant that he thought that he had them all killed. 

 

Either way you look at it, the man is monster, his inhumanity knows no fianl depth. 

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by: Storm @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 16:39:10 PM CDT

He's right: Iran does not have homosexuals like we do in the US

Our homosexuals are completely different.  We are allowed (albiet grudgingly) to live open lives.  We have recourse to defend ourselves in body, in the courts, in the media, in public opinion.  In a country gripped by fundamentalism, gays cannot fight back.  They stay in the closet, or are crushed beneath stones and hanged by the neck until dead.

 Not that we don't have forces in the US who wouldn't do the same to us.  It's funny how the fundies in the US claim to have such a hatred for the Muslim world.  Countries like Iran are what they would like here:  everyone has automatic weapons, no one has access to birth control, women are kept in their place, there is no public assistance, the rich control everything and the poor are at their mercy.  Fundies will never see this, because they look at a Muslim and only see dark skin and hear a different language; they can't see the similarities between them and their "enemy." 

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by: JoshWatermanMN @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 16:44:13 PM CDT

Great comment.

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by: Holly Capote @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 17:02:45 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

right

Exactly Josh,
NCLR (National Center for Lesbian Rights) has an excellent report on specific issues which effect lesbians who attempt sanctuary in the US...it's the visibility thing....countries like Iran won't even say they have male homosexuals let alone lesbians.  In the ongoing case of an iranian lesbian seeking sanctuary in Europe, when her mother was contacted in Iran and asked if her daughter was a lesbian, the mother denied it...so it goes...the following is a great read.

http://www.nclrights...

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by: Karen in Kalifornia @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 17:29:50 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

What about Maliki?

It's bizarre to have Republicans like Newt Gingrich and 'Conservatives' like Andrew Sullivan pounce on this statement and then demand gays show more support for Bush because of his quest to free the gays in Iran like he did the gays in Iraq. Yet the damn worthless media hasn't done the most basic followup. IE how would Maliki answer the exact same question about Iraq? If Sully and the other neocons are so adamant about international rights, why aren't they screaming and wailing about Bush's strong support of Maliki (who also denies homosexuality and says Iraq does not condone that 'western' behavior)?

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by: Ralph4159 @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 17:53:52 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Well Said, But . . .

Although poorly educated fundamentalists may well see the Iranians as the dark-skinned Other, I have no doubt that the Christian fundamentalist leaders recognize clearly that the Muslim fundamentalists are their natural allies.

The primary matter that keeps the Christian fundamentalists from sympathizing more openly with Muslim fundamentalists is their current alliance-of-convenience with right-wing Israelis. But don't be surprised, nevertheless, to see subtle admiration expressed for Muslim theocratic regimes by our own Men of God.

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by: Jim @ Tue Sep 25, 2007 at 00:25:10 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Here is a better gays in Iran video

If only because it hasn't been posted by some bigot calling himself "sickarab"

http://www.youtube.c...

<3 Sam

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by: Samie D @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 17:05:05 PM CDT

Not to be flippant...

but after I heard Ahmadinejad say Iran had no homosexuals, or that the phenomenon didn't exist in his country, I thought to myself...gosh maybe the far right charmers will want to go there!  My American homosexual friends will even help them pack. 

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by: Madison @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 17:44:12 PM CDT

Nope....

Nope....no gays here.....nothing to see......no...not here......move along folks.....nothing to see here.........

A society without religion is like a maniac without a chainsaw.

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by: Jen @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 18:47:50 PM CDT

same smug demeanor

as our president and the communication skills of a pro-wrestler in an interview before a match.  It's difficult (for me) not to answer this kind of hateful rhetoric with hateful rhetoric.  I really want to start pumping out the "Lavat" and "Tafkhiz Please" teeshirts. Where's my cafepress account?

Electricity's for light bulbs!

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by: n8nyc @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 19:03:39 PM CDT

Bush and Ahmadinejad - two of a kind...

We can look forward to the day when the criminals like Ahmadinejad, who murders boys who love boys and women who want to be treated as human, along with the criminals who went to war to steal Iraq's oil, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld and Gates who are responsible for the murder of over 650,000 Iraqis, and Bin Laden, the coward who slaughtered 3,000 civilians are all called before the dock of world opinion like Hermann Göring and the Nazi's.

But saying that does not mean that we should get sucked into the Bush plan to attack Iran and destroy it's nuclear power capability. He ahs the full support of Hillary Clinton. We have to oppose them tooth and nail.From the Guardian Unlimited Front Page Tuesday September 18, 2007; “The UN's chief nuclear weapons inspector  yesterday warned against the use of force against Iran, in what UN officials said was an attempt to halt an "out of control" drift to war. His outspoken remarks, which drew a parallel between Iran and Iraq, appeared to take aim at the US and Britain. They followed comments by French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, who said: "We have to prepare for the worst," adding "the worst is war". "I would not talk about any use of force," Mohamed El Baradei told reporters at the International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters in Vienna. "There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons." There has been a string of reports out of Washington that the Bush administration is running out of patience with diplomacy and is intensifying its plans for air strikes as a means of halting Iran's disputed nuclear programme.”French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner blabbed to the press shortly after the new French President, Nicolas Sarkozy was seen frolicking with Bush and disturbed Bush’s plans to connect the dots for an extension of the Iraq war. True to form most members of the Democratic and Republican Congress have fallen for it again, lock stock and barrel. Just like they did in 2002 when they voted for the criminal invasion to garb Iraqi oil in 2002 and continue to vote to maintain it. "The impeachable offenses of Bush outnumber any other list of impeachable offenses of any US president...How many more impeachable offenses do those spineless, gutless, hapless Democrats need in the Congress.”  Ralph Nader, September 18th, 2007 "Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in the area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”   former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan

 

The looter rich much prefer working with Democrats like Obama and the Clintons - they're greedier, they fool more people and they're able to get away with a lot more than Republicans.  

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by: donal1944 @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 20:31:47 PM CDT

Donal, please stop

As important as what you have to say might be, please stop using color and "big" tags on your comments. It is a form of hijacking the thread and is disrespectful to the other people who have put forward their time and energy toward commenting. It's annoying too.

<3 Sam

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by: Samie D @ Wed Sep 26, 2007 at 01:24:34 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Direland has been following this for a while,

and it's happening in Iraq now too-- http://direland.type...

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by: amberglow @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 21:25:53 PM CDT

Respect for Islam

JoshWatermanMN says:

"It's funny how the fundies in the US claim to have such a hatred for the Muslim world."

Actually, a rational conservative person has to have a great deal of respect for the Muslim world. It is very efficient, using birthrates, patience, threats, and violence when necessary to spread its total system. The women are subjugated and impure influences like music, dancing, and alcohol are banned, all in the name of focusing on the prize. Islam deserves immense respect. It threatens our Constitutional democracy.

The really funny thing is how Liberals don’t call for Islam’s status as a ‘religion’ to be revoked. They are the ones at risk.

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by: BigCreekBill @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 22:39:44 PM CDT

I don't think most folk are aware that...

...one of the reasons that there are "[i]n Iran we have no homosexuals" is because gay men either must either change sex or die:

...Afsaneh Najmabadi, an Iranian who is a professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, in a January 2005 article on Iranian.com wrote that she feels "uneasy" when reading these "celebratory" portrayals of Iran's attitude toward the transgendered.

"Every time I read one of these reports I want to say BUT, BUT, BUT, because there are some scary things going on that have gone almost unnoticed," she wrote.

Najmabadi, author of "Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity" (University of Chicago Press), wrote that Iran's official position on the transgendered has manufactured "a religio-psycho-medicalized discourse on 'unnatural and deviant' [ghayr-i tabi'i and inhirafi] sexualities" that is "deeply troubling because of the explicit framing of transsexuality within a particular mapping of sexuality that simultaneously renders homosexuality, and more generally any sexual and gender non-conformity, as deviant and criminal."

And while a positive and progressive attitude toward sex-change surgery is liberating for genuinely transgendered people, it can have an enormously deleterious effect when deformed to be used as a supposed "treatment," or even as punishment, to "normalize" homosexual desire.

Because homosexuality is a capital crime in Iran, and because the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been engaged in a what he has called a "cultural revolution" that involves highly-organized persecutions targeting feminists and homosexuals, the choice presented to Iranian same-sexers is often a stark and unpleasant one, a choice epitomized by the title of a recent documentary by the France 2 public television network's newsmagazine "Envoyé spécial," which called its half-hour broadcast on the transgendered in Iran "Changer de Sex ou Mourir" - "Change Sex or Die."

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~~Autumn~~

As if there were safety in stupidity alone.
--Henry David Thoreau

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by: Autumn Sandeen @ Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 22:47:28 PM CDT

a relevant thread on freerepublic regarding the fundies' prevailing attitudes towards muslims:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1900985/posts

The gays stole my lunch money

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by: matt in mpls @ Tue Sep 25, 2007 at 14:57:21 PM CDT

Bad Manners

What I don't understand is why the president of Columbia University invited Ahmadinejad to speak and then was so appallingly rude to him in his introduction.  Why invite him at all if the point was to attack him?  He could have done that without showing himself up as a borish pompous blowhard and reflecting badly on Columbia as a host.  Is this how we want to present ourselves to the world?  What an embarressment.   I prefer my own method, which is to wait until your guests have left to trash them. 

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by: Brian @ Wed Sep 26, 2007 at 06:59:17 AM CDT

i agree

i didn't understand the point of the visit in the first place, other than for the public to sneer at ahmadenejad like it was an episode of "jerry springer".  how stupid. 

The gays stole my lunch money

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by: matt in mpls @ Wed Sep 26, 2007 at 11:49:27 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Larry Craig / DADT

I just heard a great commentary on the radio this morning by Dave Ross (someone I don't usually agree with) regardng the "...we don't have homoexuals" remark.

Iran's leader sounds an awful lot like Larry "I am not gay" Craig. Supreme denial.

How different is Iran's position than our military's position of DADT?  Ultimately, the US military assumes that DADT means there are no gays in the military, right?  None.  And any that are found are thrown out.  NONE.  

Ahmadinejad may sound like an extremst nutjob homophobe but he also sounds like he'd have plenty of friends here in the good ol' US of A-hole.  They should give him his own blog at Focus on the Anus.

I'm surprised Bush hasn't considered giving him the Medal of Freedom and Cheney could hang it around his neck.    

 

 

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by: Patrick @ Wed Sep 26, 2007 at 08:28:52 AM CDT