Democrat hypocrisy on gay rights

Bret Stephens:

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been doing a brisk business in harassing, entrapping, lashing, imprisoning and executing homosexuals since nearly the moment it came to power in 1979, with little notice in the West beyond the occasional human-rights report. So when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the startling claim at Columbia University last week that "we do not have homosexuals in Iran like you do in your country," it offered what could have been a learning opportunity to those who think Iran is just another misunderstood regime with an equally misunderstood president.

Such wishful thinking. The Democratic Party's presidential hopefuls spent a fair bit of time Wednesday night debating what to do about Iran, without once mentioning Ahmadinejad's peculiar world view. These are the same debaters who in August went before a gay audience to denounce Bush administration policies as "demeaning" and "degrading" toward gays. In the Nation--a magazine that excoriated Ronald Reagan upon his passing for his "inaction and bigotry against gays"--editor Katrina vanden Heuvel has nothing to say about the subject either. Instead, she devotes her latest column to denouncing last week's symbolic Senate vote to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization.

In the Guardian, another crusading voice from the left on gay rights, foreign-affairs columnist Martin Woollacott lambastes Columbia's president Lee Bollinger for his "mean-spirited" remarks to the Iranian president, which he takes as an indication that "it is still difficult to suggest that Iran has arguments and interests worth considering on their merits." But again, no mention of Mr. Ahmadinejad's attitude toward gays, much less its "merits." And on "progressive" Web sites like Democratic Underground, there are earnest debates about exactly what Mr. Ahmadinejad meant by the word "like," as if he were merely making an academic cultural comparison rather than denying the existence of an entire category of his own citizens.

Long gone are the days when people spoke of the love that dare not speak its name. We are now living in the era of the hate-that-dare-not-be-spoken-about--lest disingenuous neocons use Mr. Ahmadinejad's unfortunate pronouncements to cut off dialogue and beat the drums for war. But if one side of the political spectrum is not to be trusted to discuss the subject, and the other side simply won't, who will?

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What this event demonstrates is that Democrats and liberals don't really respect gays as much as they respect multiculturalism. They are in fact just using gays for political purposes in a much more cynical way than conservatives who take a principled stand against gay marriage, but think it is wrong to ignore the abuses they suffer in regimes dominated by Islamic religious bigots.

Rober Spencer also discusses Islamic bigotry.

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In light of all this, the silence of campus gay rights groups and the so-called “progressive” Left generally about the global efforts by Islamic jihadists to impose Islamic Sharia law is appallingly short-sighted. While they attack Christians, who are not calling for gays to be imprisoned or killed under any circumstances, they say nothing about a genuine threat to their survival. While they attack Israel, a gay-friendly country, they are silent about the murder of gays in Islamic Iran.

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They don't say anything because they don't want to have to do anything about the consequences of acknowledging the reality of life among the Islamic bigots.