Iran's Gay Execution Verdict An Opportunity to Reclaim Public

An Iranian court kept with the government's anti-gay tradition this weekend when it sentenced a teenager named Ebrahim Hamidi to death for having nebulous "homosexual relations." Three of his friends were acquitted, and all four teens claim the charges are phony. Regardless, the court ordered Hamidi to be hanged, because that's how Iran's injustice system works. And that's how it will continue to work unless the Iranian and international public come out against the regime's persistent sexual policing.

Iran's revolutionary Islamic regime has a long history of anti-gay persecution. After years of relative acceptance under the Shah, LGBT folk were pushed underground by the Ayatollah and his Islamic revolution, which ordered gays hanged, stoned or otherwise publicly offed for their "sinful behavior."

Despite the relative regularity of these barbaric displays, it's hard to tally the amount of gay people who have been murdered in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. The government does not offer any accurate count, nor do they offer many details. The most recent recorded deaths were in 2005, when two teens were hanged. Another man was similarly executed in 2003, and there's no telling how many have been killed in private.

Public deaths, however, provide a unique situation for oppositional protest. The government wants people to watch the gruesome spectacle, thus spreading fear and loathing among its oppressed citizens. If citizens of the world stop watching the death and start protesting it, then the public aspect of these murders becomes a weapon to be wielded, rather than feared.

Iranian citizens don't enjoy a free civil society. And that's putting it lightly. The Islamic regime has made sure dissidents enjoy nothing but pain and punishment, and public executions are designed specifically to spread fear and loathing among oppressed citizens. But Iran's citizens proved in last year's Green Revolution that they're not as oppressed as the government thought.

They're clearly fed up with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and if they've truly had enough, they will disavow Hamidi's and other potential executions, like the one against a mother of two who's accused of adultery. The opposition must reclaim the public sphere by refusing to let it be soaked in blood. And that goes for the international community, too.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last month insisted that gay rights and human rights are inextricably linked. "Let me say today that human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights, once and for all,” proclaimed Clinton only days before the United States would sign more sanctions against Iran. Clearly we have a vested interest in tamping down Ahmadinejad, yet our government continues to drag its feet on social issues like women's and gay rights.

If Clinton, Obama and the rest of the Western world do truly want to build democracy in Iran and elsewhere, they need to take a public stand against anti-gay sexual policing and executions. Hamidi's conviction should become as much of an international incident as Neda Agha-Soltan's shooting during the Green Revolution. As long as homophobia runs rampant in Iran, so too will extremist ideology and its culture of death. The public must reassert itself in Iran and refuse to let its streets, squares and mosques be turned into battlegrounds for the government's moral crusades.

Image via Poritsky's Flickr.