We easily forget what a terrible cost is paid by individuals who do not hide in fear. Thanks, Michael, for sending me the link on Facebook to this tragic news story. Two [1] Iranian teen boys were hanged for the crime of homosexuality—identified only as M.A. and A.M. but photographed just before their deaths.

This brutal act of course is also meant to shame and intimidate not only all gay people in Iran but also the families of these young guys.

While we are reveling in the news of emerging freedom in Egypt, and the promise of the fall of other despotic regimes, blood is being shed. Lives are being lost in the struggle in Libya. Iraqis are still killing Iraqis because of a millennium-old rivalry. the rest of the Mideast will not see another [2] Velvet Revolution. Definitely [3] not in Iran. And Iran is worse than Libya because it has great strength and more power to hurt greater numbers of people.

I can’t help thinking, of course, that in brutally killing boys, Iran’s obsession with maintaining the purity of Islam as they see it is their way of saying, “WE WILL NOT let anything Western influence our view of reality.”

Ultimately it will not work. Over time, medieval Islam will change or crumble, just like the medieval West has changed—some crumbling, some destroyed through revolution, some adapting and reinterpreting its traditions.

But in the meantime, countless thousands of people will bleed and die. No matter how reasoned my own mental analysis of these moral, cultural and historic issues might be, I cannot wrap my mind around the idea that Allah is pleased with the torture, blood, pain and death of people. Capital punishment is barbaric, no matter where instituted and for what “crime.”

From the Beirut.Indymedia.org article: “According to the website Age of Consent, which monitors such laws around the world, in Iran “Homosexuality is illegal, those charged with love-making are given a choice of four deathstyles: being hanged, stoned, halved by a sword, or dropped from the highest perch.”

Pray for God’s eternal compassion for these young men and countless others.

—Pastor Dan Hooper