Iran Deal Betrays Gay Iranians

Why gay people should be at the forefront of opposing the Iran Nuclear Deal.

The Nuclear Deal emboldens Iran's repressive, fanatical regime 

In today's Times piece, "The Iran deal makes a terrible war inevitable," (31 August 2015), Melanie Phillips makes the case that the US and the UK have not prevented Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, and that, instead, they have only delayed it. She also draws attention to the staggering claim by Philip Hammond - the UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs - that "Iran was a “normal country” and “not a regimented, disciplined society under the thumb of an authority.”


Mrs Phillips's assertion, "Normal? This is a regime which jails, tortures and hangs dissidents and gays," is absolutely correct; and this is a shaming fact for the liberal Left and the appeasing Right, who are rejoicing at the reckless act of surrender that is represented by the Iran Deal.

Islamist Iran's persecution of LGBTs

In fact, the betrayal of Iranian gay and lesbian people (and other dissidents) by those bolstering the power of Iran's religiofascist orthodoxy is an utter disgrace, and it is a marker of how many pseudo-progressives are prepared to betray their apparent principles for the sake of appeasing an Islamist state with clear nuclear ambitions, that the championing of LGBT fundamental rights in Iran (i.e. the right not to be imprisoned, tortured and executed for being gay), and the exposure of atrocities inflicted by its state on Iranian gay people, are being left to social conservatives such as Melanie Phillips, who has expressed her objections to homosexuality in the pages of The Times and elsewhere. What an irony those false friends of gay people, those pseudo-progressives and short-term pragmatists, have allowed to unfurl.

I was recently reminded of this paradoxical phenomenon when watching an interview by the American social conservative and television host, Sean Hannity, when he repeatedly tried to press a grossly homophobic Islamist sympathiser to answer the question whether gay people should be stoned to death. On the world stage, today's best friends of gay and lesbian people have turned out to be the conservative Right. What an irony: but thank goodness the conservative Right are speaking out, and what a relief that must be to Iranian dissidents and gay people, if they ever get to know about it.

Let's remember hanged dissident and LGBT Iranians.

The triumph of same-sex marriage in the West has no meaning to the young gay Iranian being hanged for homosexuality. When exposing the extreme homophobia of the Iranian regime and other Islamists, it is conservatives such as Melanie Phillips who are taking by far the most important stand against the persecution of gay people in Iran --- and not President Obama, the architect and arch-proponent of the Iran Deal, notwithstanding the latter's intervention to support legalisation of same-sex marriage across the USA. 

The liberal Left and the appeasing Right, including those in the Western gay community (for whom same-sex marriage seems to be a much more important headline than Iranian gay people with their heads in Islamist nooses or gay Muslims being thrown from high buildings by ISIS) who support the Iran Deal with its fillip to Iran's nuclear ambitions, are betraying not only Iranian gay people and Iranian dissidents by empowering their cruel, terrorist government: they are also betraying the external enemies of Iran, including ourselves, who are now much more likely to find ourselves exposed to nuclear blackmail at some point in the future at the hands of an execrable Islamist state or of its terrorist allies. 

© Gary Powell, 2015

Tim Farron on gay sex morality

My piece for PinkNews, published on 10 August 2015:

Comment: Tim Farron’s silence on the ‘sinfulness’ of gay sex is not good enough