Andrew Sullivan Quotes
Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect.
Sullivan, Andrew. Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival. Knopf, 1998.
This statement gave the audience quite a laugh. There has been a small percentage of homosexuals in every society known to man—especially the ones who condemn it the most. In order for those opposing societies and cultures to speak about homosexuality, write about it and pass laws against it, there must have of course been some homosexuality. In the case of Iran and its Persian tradition and the Arab tradition there has been historically not only open homosexuality in different periods as in Ancient Greece, but it is documented by some of the great Persian and Arab literature. See {624479}.
Islam forbids homosexuality and Sharia (Islamic religious law) prescribes death as the penalty for homosexuality. At that time Iran was a Muslim theocracy and if there were overt homosexuality that was officially discovered, the heretics would be killed. The logic of the government was that since they had killed the homosexuals, there were none left. At the same time all the research showed that while Muslim homosexuality was slightly less than Christian, it was still quite significant in all Muslim cultures that had been studied. If the President was to be believed, Iran was the only exception.
Earlier, he had opposed same sex marriage, but as the population as a whole had a change of mind on this issue, so did he. By 2013, 16 States had modified their laws to allow gay marriage.
Five years earlier, the World Health Organization classified homosexuality as a mental disease. When he made this statement, Guterres went against his own political party and most public opinion in Portugal. Two decades later, when he was elected Secretary General of the United Nations, he had flip-flopped on the homosexuality issue.
Andrew Michael Sullivan is a British-American author, editor, and blogger. Sullivan is a political commentator, a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books. He started a political blog, The Daily Dish, in 2000, and eventually moved his blog to platforms, including Time, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and finally an independent subscription-based format. He announced his retirement from blogging in 2015. From 2016 to 2020, Sullivan was a writer-at-large at New York. His newsletter The Weekly Dish was launched in July 2020.
