Baptists in North Carolina may call on homosexuals to repent, but in Iran …

Homosexuals deserve to be executed or tortured and possibly both, an Iranian leader told British MPs during a private meeting at a peace conference, The Times has learnt.

Mohsen Yahyavi is the highest-ranked politician to admit that Iran believes in the death penalty for homosexuality after a spate of reports that gay youths were being hanged.

HT: Hugh Hewitt

How would Jesus love a homosexual? Joe Fairclough, a British man jailed after he refused help from a homosexual librarian, and Chad Thompson, author of Loving Homosexuals as Jesus Would, give two different answers.

Manchester Evening News said that when a homosexual librarian offered to assist Fairclough, he asked for another employee. “He asked why,” Fairclough said. “I pointed towards a ring on his finger and said I didn’t approve of two men being married. He then told me I was barred.”

When Fairclough went to the police station to complain, they jailed him for violating public order and released him eight hours later. In the past year, Fairclough has posted anti-homosexual comments on the library notice board and has protested outside the library against homosexual adoption. Fairclough, described as a “devout Christian,” defended himself: “I am against homosexuality but I don’t wish anyone any harm.”

Thompson responds to the incident, saying “It is not my job as a Christian to criticize those who are in the wrong unless God is specifically leading me to do it. Many people are so wounded that they cannot receive criticism without taking it personally. … My default position should be encouragement and love and grace.”

Thompson said when Christians discriminate against homosexuals, “It just adds to their shame, the preexisting litany of voices in their head telling them they’re not good enough.” Christians should not refuse help from a homosexual employee, and they should not refuse to hire, rent to, or serve homosexuals, Thompson said. He gave the example of a North Carolina ski resort that fired an employee because she was lesbian: “I don’t believe Jesus would have done that.”

“The Christian church needs a change of heart on this issue,” Thompson said. “Our emphasis needs to be not on what they aren’t, but on what they are. And they are deeply, madly loved by their Creator.”

The government across the Pond proposed a new law last week to criminalize hate speech directed at gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender Britons.

“[W]e are now appalled by hatred and invective directed at people on the basis of their sexuality,” British Justice Secretary Jack Straw said, giving Parliament the law’s raison d’être. “It is time for the law to recognize this.”

Most British Christians indeed recognize that, but few want a law that does it as well — and threatens jail time for holding religious convictions. Legally, others wonder why the Single Equality Bill, as it’s called, is even necessary; criminal laws already punish violence, harassment and threats against homosexuals.

Further concern rises from the proposed max sentence of seven years in prison. The average sentence for a rape conviction in England is also seven years, as it turns out.

The Church of England has denounced the law, suggesting it would permit homosexuals to sue the church if clergy condemned homosexuality as sinful.

“A homophobic hatred law would be used by those with an axe to grind against Christians to silence them,” Colin Hart, director of England’s Christian Institute, tells The Times. He adds it would not be the first time police interfered with free speech and religious liberty vis-à-vis sexual ethics. And police, it was announced, would be the final arbiters of who has “crossed the line” into this “atmosphere or climate” of hatred.

But no worries, the gay lobby assures Christians: “It will not apply to those who temperately express religious views,” one gay rights campaigner said. Another explained everything’s hunky-dory so long as Christians voice disagreement in a “temperate” and “polite” manner — drawing the line, apparently, at rude free speech.

“‘Polite’ and ‘temperate’ are words homosexual activists should consider,” Rodger Harper, a Texas missionary in London’s Docklands neighborhood who has ministered to the city’s gays, told WOW. “Not only is the homosexual agenda a minority position, it is always hostile, radically hostile, to Christianity. There’s nothing ‘temperate’ or ‘polite’ about it.”

But given the rape stats, the law could put lesbians — staunchly feminist, as a group — in the unenviable position of explaining how slurs to one’s sexuality are on par with brutal acts of misogyny.

This is a striking photo. It has haunted me since I saw it two days ago. These are two allegedly homosexual teenaged boys being hanged in Iran. I am left wondering what the nature and extent of their transgression was. Were they caught in an ill-considered moment of curiosity and moral weakness? Did haunting menaces escape from the basement of their hearts at a time that turned suddenly and terribly public?

They could not have been open and flagrant homosexuals. There is obviously no allowance for open self-disclosure of that sort in the Islamic Republic. Iran does not have a homosexual activist network that identifies young people who betray aberrant tendencies, misleads them with foolish counsel, and emboldens them in shameless behavior.

Perhaps that is all that Ahmadinejad meant when he said, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon, I don’t know who told you we had it.” They do not have homosexuals of the sort that we have. They do not have “gays.” Homosexual is an orientation of the heart sexually. Gay is a lifestyle. Not all homosexuals are gay. Or perhaps he was just telling a Big Lie.

All the same, the reason I think that this photo caught people’s attention is not horror over the fact that Iran hangs criminals, nor even that they hang homosexuals. It is the tender age of these convicts that takes us aback and shocks our western moral sensibilities. Surely these boys were not hardened in their ways. Surely they were just confused, or perhaps themselves victims of some gross indecency. Surely all that they needed was some gracious and discreet intervention which, along with rigid Middle Eastern social conventions, should be sufficient to prevent the slide of Iranian society into the swamp of Western moral dissolution. Hanging in this case seems particularly brutal, unnecessary and…ungracious.

For one who is supposedly merciful, it seems that Mohammed’s God is not anything of the sort when his religion takes charge politically, at least in Iran…and Afghanistan, and Iraq’s Anbar province.

Praise God that his message of salvation in Christ is one of grace, and that he is making his people gracious because he is making them Christ. “In Christ we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight…” (Ephesians 1:7-8).

Tonight, the CW network premiered the new sitcom “Aliens in America,” which follows the exploits of a Muslim Pakistani foreign exchange student living in small-town middle America. Everyone from those at the Brookings Institution to the Islamic Center of Southern California have praised the show for its “more diverse” representation of Muslims - in other words, depicting them as something other than terrorists. “This will be the first and maybe even primary source for most Americans in understanding anything positive or accurate about Islam,” said Jihad Turk, the center’s religious director. We’ll see how they feel about it after next week’s episode, in which the Muslim teen and his host are thought to be gay, a plot turn that even USA Today reviewer Robert Bianco found “atrocious.”