Executing Gays in Iran

—By

| Thu Jul. 20, 2006 2:02 PM PDT

If their nuclear ambitions and support for Hizbullah weren't enough, here's another reason to despise the regime in Teheran: they're one of a handful of countries where homosexuality is punished by death. Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the public hanging of two gay teenagers in the city of Mashad. Human Rights Watch reports that police commonly tap phones and raid private homes to catch gay men and lesbians, and LGBT activist groups (based outside Iran, natch) estimate that as many as 4,000 such sexual malefactors have been executed since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

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