(ISNA/Photo:MASHHAD)

Sad anniversary....

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the brutal executions of two gay Iranian teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni (above).

Their deaths are the predictable and tragic outcome of “Vice and Virtues” nonsense like that reported in my post yesterday. The two boys—and they were boys: while their reported ages varied, with them being allegedly as young as 14 and 16 at their arrests, no one disputes that they had not yet turned 20 by the time they were killed. The two boys were incarcerated and tortured for 14 months, then hanged, for allegedly raping a 13-year-old boy. This accusation has been universally disputed by all but the most hardened homophobes.

Their real crime was engaging in a long-term consensual sexual relationship with each other in a country governed by Sharia. One speaker at a rally to honour the boys that I attended in Dublin’s city centre yesterday evening, Irish Senator David Norris, said a family member likely turned the boys in to the “religious” police.

So much for “family values.”

As religious fundamentalism strengthens its hold in countries as diverse as the US, Russia, Poland, Nigeria, and throughout the Middle East, LGBT folks are increasingly coming under both metaphorical and all-too-real fire. Calls for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in the US, with the ensuing bashings and deaths such homophobic rhetoric fosters. Beheadings of gays in Saudi Arabia. Abductions, torture and murders of suspected gays in Iraq. Executions of gays by stoning in Nigeria. Police sanctioned beatings of demonstrators at a Gay Pride parade in Russia.

And this brutal hanging a year ago in Iran.

As speakers emphasised yesterday, this is not an LGBT issue, it’s a human rights issue.

Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni will be remembered.