Another example of GOP/Christofascists hypocrisy likewise comes from policy positions dealing with the Middle East. Here at home in America, Christofascists are only too happy to deprive gays of civil rights, denigrate and stigmatize us at every turn, and claim that we are worthy of death in the minds of many professional Christians. But if Iran executes gays for being gay, suddenly these same foul and hypocrisy filled individuals shriek and condemn the murders which in fact are nothing more than a more extreme extension of their own beliefs/policies. A column in The Daily Beast looks at this disingenuous hypocrisy on parade. Here are excerpts:
[T]wo men, Abdullah Ghavami Chahzanjiru and Salman Ghanbari Chahzanjiri, were hanged in southern Iran on August 6, possibly for consensual sodomy. Their deaths are part of a wave of executions in Iran, with more than 400 in the first half of 2014 alone, according to the NGO Iran Human Rights.
If these men were hanged for consensual homosexuality, however, this could be another LGBT headache for the Obama administration, which has been trying to walk a tightrope between LGBT human rights on one end and international politics on the other.
Despite Iran’s state anti-Semitism, the recent arrest of U.S. journalists, and the continued oppression of women, the Obama administration has been attempting a rapprochement with the Iranian regime. Fending off Iran hawks in Congress and the D.C. punditocracy, the administration has argued for a policy of constructive engagement, pursuing diplomacy over military action to halt Iran’s nuclear program. The execution of two gay men, while it may not be surprising, certainly doesn’t make that “engagement” any easier.
Just a few weeks ago, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on human rights in Iran at which progressives such as Hossein Alizadeh of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission testified about Iran’s hideous record of criminalization and persecution.
But at that same hearing, some of the most vocal defenses of human rights came from Robert George—the intellectual father of the right-wing “religious liberty” movement and, domestically at least, a zealous opponent of LGBT equality—and Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chris Smith, and Ed Royce, who used Iran’s human rights record as evidence against the Obama administration’s policy of engagement.
[T]he fact remains that when Iran persecutes gay people, conservatives in the United States suddenly become enamored of gay rights—and bash the Obama administration for not doing enough to defend them. Thus the administration is hit from all sides—at a moment in which it is trying to pursue its dicey diplomatic agenda.
The phenomenon of invoking LGBT equality as a justification for American foreign policies, which theorist Jasbir Puar calls “homonationalism,” has been around for several years. (Puar might prefer the term “imperialism.”) Even as conservatives fight LGBT equality at home, Puar says, they champion it overseas—as long as it serves their interests to do so.
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