On Sep 25, 2007, at 5:50 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 17:02 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:
>
>> is it possible that he, like the ancient Greeks that we're all
>> supposed to admire so much, doesn't see homosexual people as existing
>> as much as homosexual _behaviors_ that some engage in?
>
> This was exactly Yoshie's original point, if I understood
> her correctly.
Yeah that's her point, but how do we know that's where Ahmadinejad is coming from? It's certainly what his apologists are seizing on - some dude on Lou Proyect's list is making the same point. But Iran is not a backwater. Yoshie's scornful of the Westernized upper class that's adopted our model of sexual identity, but they're still harassed and oppressed - and it means that Iran doesn't entirely deserve the Orientalism-in-reverse defense.
Doug