Friday, October 05, 2007

7,000 Lashes For Being Gay

Hopefully, this article doesn't give some of our local Virginia judges any ideas. Of course, if Daddy Dobson ever gets the theocracy he wants, we gays had best look out. Meanwhile, this 365gay.com story (http://www.365gay.com/Newscon07/10/100407saudi.htm) shows (1) precisely why religion should have no role in the civil laws and (2) the sad existence of gays in parts of the Islamic world, even in countries that are allegedly US allies:
(Riyadh) Saudi prison authorities this week began administering 7,000 lashes to each of two men convicted of committing "homosexual acts", a local newspaper reported on Thursday. The Okaz newspaper says that the sentence was being meted out in "phases" and was being conducted in a public square in the southwestern city of Al-Bahah.
The floggings began on Tuesday. The men were dragged into the square, their shirts removed and they where whipped. They were then returned to prison. The process was repeated on Wednesday and will continue daily until all 7,000 lashes have been administered. Shari’a law, as interpreted and enforced in Saudi Arabia, allows sentences ranging from imprisonment and flogging to death for “deviant sexual behavior.”
Last year 20 men were arrested at what officials say was a "gay wedding" in the town of Jizan. Their fate is unknown. In April, 2005, 35 men were sentenced by a Saudi court to be flogged after they attended what has been described as a “gay wedding”. A month earlier a gay couple was beaded in a public execution in the northern town of Arar, near the Iraq border. The pair had been convicted of killing a blackmailer. If they had been exposed as gay they could have been executed anyway.
Meanwhile Chimperator Bush's regime gives Saudi Arabia a free pass on human rights abuses.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bush will be gone one day, and we will still be left with a depraved relationship with this ignoble kingdom, which long predates his corrupt family's personal indebtedness to its rulers. You make a point which not only deserves, but requires the most constant and, hopefully, concerted pressure from Americans across a spectrum from Planned Parenthood, on female genital mutilation, to the Human Rights Campaign Fund, on floggings, beheadings, and stonings for the female refusal of rape and the male acceptance of male sex. Ours is a nation state which assiduously cultivates sexual repression in the broadest and most pathologically aggravated ways, even down to the extortion of Christian confession for the receipt of food and medical treatment -- and not merely through Constitutionally suspect, subcontracted "faith-based initiatives." We do not need to look to "islamofascism" for our terror. As you observe, we grow it here.