But why should we be surprised? Bush said we were spreading FREEDOM to the Muslim world, didn’t he?

First I saw the news at a website called OneNewsNow which gave no supporting facts, and wondered whether it was real, but, following the links, first to the site of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, then to a May 22 item by Al Kamen in the Washington Post, “For One Night, Baghdad Gets a Pink Zone,” I found that it was real. On May 29 the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, which happens to be a Muslim country, held a “gay pride” party, at which attendees were dressed in drag and prizes were given out for Best Dressed Gay Icon and Best Lip Synching Performance. Here is the invitation sent out by the U.S. embassy:

Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, says homosexual activism at U.S. embassies was prevalent during the Bush administration, but it has gone a step further under the Obama administration.

“This is insanity to rub America’s gay pride in the face of a country filled with Muslims who reject homosexuality as shameful,” he contends. “It is bad foreign policy, bad diplomacy, and it’s another reason for these people to hate the United States.”

In “Islam’s Love-Hate Relationship with Homosexuality,” Serge Trikovic summed up the problem of Islam’s approach to homosexuality as follows:

Men and women have been created different, and the recognition of those differences is essential in any society that does not want to follow the path of post-modern depravity. The denial of that difference is essential in the Faustian experiment to which the West is subjecting itself, and those who do not wish to partake in the proceedings may find Islam’s frank admission of difference between sexes alluring; but that is the lure of dementia as the cure for cancer. Islam has found the opposite extreme of the modern West’s bed-hopping unisex feminism, and has found it equally a source of opposite, though equally poisonous, pathologies. The traditional Western view, a balance between sexual equality and sexual difference, between freedom and restraint, is the best answer. Islam’s problem of homosexuality, a reflection of the deeper psychosis endemic to the Islamic world view, illustrates a problem that cannot be solved short of Islam’s thorough and comprehensive reform and revision.

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Ken Hechtman writes:

From my reading of the Washington Post article, this seems to be a private party organized by and for embassy staffers. It wasn’t promoted to the general public.

Even so, it strikes me as in bad taste to throw a gay pride party when outside the US embassy homosexuality is still a death penalty offense.

This is from a petition defending homosexuals in the Muslim world from the death penalty.

EveryOne Group and civil society in democratic countries have taken up the appeal from the IRAQI LGBT association, based in London, which calls on activists and democratic citizens to take part in an international campaign to save the lives of 128 prisoners sentenced to death because they are homosexual. According to the judicial and religious authorities, the prisoners will be murdered in groups of about 20 people. The first series of executions is imminent. Over the last three years 132 homosexuals have been put to death, including 17 Iraqi LGBT activists.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 30, 2009 11:02 AM | Send