October 01, 2007
Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his widely discussed address at Columbia University last week maintained that homosexuals do not exist in his country, the neocon-Republican war squad has gone into high gear stressing the persecution of gays under the Mullahs. Listening to the foaming Sean Hannity and reading indignant columns in the New York Post, one might believe that homosexuality is now a core “conservative” value. What is really happening is that the “conservative movement” has adopted Nietzsche’s daring maxim that “a good war may justify any cause.” As long as the neoconservatives can manage to get Bush II to blow up Iran before leaving the White House in ignominy, they will happily imitate the Village Voice. After all, the same chatterers were yapping nonstop about how our occupation of Iraq would bring such fringe benefits as bringing equality to the fair sex in Mesopotamia. One is reminded here of President McKinley’s improvised justification for taking the Philippines from Spain that he was “bringing Christianity to a heathen people.” (That was before Wilsonianism replaced Christianity as our national doctrine.) Although McKinley subsequently discovered that many of the Filipinos had been converted to Catholicism centuries earlier, he still went ahead and did what he had already resolved on.
Although I would not condone the bullying and jailing of homosexuals that undoubtedly goes on in Iran, certainly other groups with more traditional lifestyles, like Christians, have suffered grievously there as well. Why have the war squads, which claim to be “conservative,” begun to display such disproportionate and apparently angry interest in the Iranian government’s intolerance of gays? The answer is too simple to be missed: The neoconservatives are trying to reach out to the left in creating a consensus for an offensive war against Iran, to be prosecuted by the current, collapsing administration. And they certainly know that the Evangelicals and the “conservative movement” will support their efforts no matter what kinds of stated moral concerns the agitation for war may require. Still it is funny to watch Sean Hannity contorting his face in ire, as he complains that the gay lobby will not join him in protesting the bad treatment of homosexuals in Ahmadinejad’s Iran.
