Not to defend Iran, whose government I abhor, but the reporting in that Sun article is dodgy.

Homosexuality is illegal in Iran and gay people are hanged from cranes in the street in sick public executions.

Actually, homosexuality is not illegal in Iran. Committing certain homosexual acts is. And the law says the acts have to be witnessed by three other men who provide sworn testimony in court.

Of course, the courts are kangaroo courts, charges are often trumped up, phony witnesses give false testimony and judges make rulings that go against international standards of human rights all the time.

Yes, Iran has been encouraging transition as a way of "curing" homosexuality, particularly male homosexuality, since the 1980s. The government of the Islamic Republic or Iran is horribly homophobic, draconian, anti-woman, cruel and its jurisprudence is literally medieval, drawn from the Sharia the code Muhammed instituted in the 7th century.

Iran hangs people in sick public executions people for all sorts of reasons. But most of them are not gay.

What's more, the handful of gay males who have been hanged in Iran in recent years have not been convicted of homosexual acts alone. Most have been convicted of homosexual rape - and other crimes that in Iran carry the death penalty such as kidnapping and robbery.

In 2019, Iran executed a 31 year-old man for kidnapping two 15 year-old boys and anally raping them. That's male homosexual rape, not homosexuality.

In 2016, Iran executed a 19 year-old man for "forced male-to-male anal intercourse." Again, male homosexual rape, not being homosexual.

In 2011, Iran executed three reportedly homosexual men who were found guilty of robbery, kidnapping and male homosexual acts. The robbery and kidnapping alone would've gotten them the death penalty.

Again, I am not defending Iran. I am trying to correct the inaccurate reporting in that story.

Most of the people hanged in Iran are executed for crimes having nothing to do with sexual orientation. And the homosexual men who have been executed have been killed for other crimes that carry the death penalty, some of which are related to being gay and some of which are unrelated - not simply for being gay in and of itself.

BTW, I think NONE of the men Iran hangs from cranes should be executed. Just as I think think Iran's first female cabinet member, Faroukou Parsa, should not have been executed by firing squad in 1981 for refusing the forced veiling edict and speaking out against it. Just as I think the young Iranian women today who are doffing their hijabs in public should not be getting arrested, convicted and sent to prison - in many cases given sentences over 25 years.

I am just trying to make the point that men in Iran are not being rounded up and hanged en masse. That's a claim gay male activists like Peter Tatchell in the West and Western organizations like Stonewall make for their own purposes. None of these activists or organizations in the West are doing much - or anything, really - to help gay men and lesbians in Iran and the rest of the Islamic world, where it is indeed horrible to be gay or lesbian.

Instead, powerful gay men and men's rights orgs like Stonewall, HRC, GLAAD etc have turned their back on homosexual people in the intolerant Islamic world and have chosen to focus on issues meant to advance their own selfish agenda of more unbridled male libertinism in their own home countries in the West: "trans rights," normalizing kink, queering the classroom, encouraging gender non-conforming girls and young women to hate, sterilize and mutilate themselves, grooming children for sex with adults, dismantling child safeguarding, getting men into women's prisons, opening up female sports to males, erasing all the legal barriers to surrogacy, making it a legal right for gay men to have biological children even if that means coercing women into donating eggs and renting out their wombs, and demonizing feminists for not going along with all this.

Tatchell, who was one of the two people quoted in that article, advocates for grown men to be able to have sex with boys as young as nine - and says this is good for the boys. Tatchell also says girls who don't feel comfortable having to get changed or shower in the presence of naked men leering and wagging their dicks around need to work on "getting over" their embarrassment and discomfort. Most recently, Tatchell claimed it was "homophobic" for a park in the UK to cut back its shrubbery because gay men "need" to cruise for and have sex in public places like parks.