There are three different questions here:
1 Has same-sex sex been, and is it being, condoned in _practice_, despite the law?
2 Is same-sex sex _now_ explicitly condoned by the law?
3 Is it possible that same-sex sex will be condoned by the law in the _future_?
The answer to 1 is yes (as you can see from Iran's government's practice of distributing condoms in prisons -- for more information, see Hannah Allam's article excerpted below), and the answer to 2 is no, and the answer to 3 is "Depends." Who would have thought in the early 20th century that eventually major denominations of Judaism and Protestantism would condone same-sex sex? Things change. Moreover, what is already happening in practice tends to eventually get acknowledged in laws and other spheres of ideology.
> T: But it is more of a struggle, the more religious the country is, the
> very point that you don't want to concede. It was relatively easy for
> Cuba to move to a position of official toleration. In South Africa, the
> situation is ambiguous, with official protection of gay rights, but
> extremes of social prejudice that compromise that. But in Iran under the
> present regime the debate is a non-starter, as your friend made clear in
> New York. Now you can dig and dig through all the arcane documents that
> you can find but what you need to do is to show me a government today
> that rules in the name of Islam that is opening up a public debate
> around the decriminalisation of homosexuality and then you will really
> make my jaw drop. Another point: the sources that you're currently
> looking at appear to reflect an older Islamic society, a
> pre-fundamentalist one, precisely the kind of society that the
> fundamentalists of every stripe regard as degraded, disgraceful and
> shameful (you can go back a number of decades and find Iranian clergy,
> including Khomeini, even condoning the smoking of opium, which they
> would never do publicly today). My other point: whether fundamentalist
> Islam today is a modernist movement, i.e. post-enlightenment. It is so,
> but only partially. In natural sciences and technology it is thoroughly
> modernist, but there is no notion of social progress within it other
> than the propogation of Islam plus technological rationality. There are
> very deep historical reasons for this, and also profound similarities
> with the fascist project of the corporatist state. But the bottom line
> is that there is nothing enlightened in religious law. Period. I don't
> share your enthusiasm for nation states, any of them, and I don't
> champion any against the others, but I recognise the necessity rather
> from a leftwing perspective of pressuring every government to shed its
> obscurantism and its hocus pocus forms of oppression, including the US.
> That is only a precondition for social progress.
If the Iranians had postponed all struggles for social progress till such time as they changed the Islamic state into a secular state, no change would have happened since the founding of the Islamic Republic.
Wisely, they didn't think that a secular state is a "precondition" for any social progress.
As for Cuba and South Africa, Iran recognized the rights of transsexuals decades earlier than Cuba (via Khomeini's fatwa, no less), and Iran's AIDS policy is more progressive than South Africa's. We need to look at is the content of each program of each government, regardless of whether the government is officially secular or religious or in-between.
<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0414-03.htm> Published on Friday, April 14, 2006 by Knight Ridder Iran's AIDS-Prevention Program Among World's Most Progressive by Hannah Allam
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It still doles out floggings to Iranians caught with alcohol, but it gives clean syringes and methadone treatment to heroin addicts. Health workers pass out condoms to prostitutes. Government clinics in every region offer free HIV testing, counseling and treatment. A state-backed magazine just began a monthly column that profiles HIV-positive Iranians, and last year the postal service unveiled a stamp emblazoned with a red ribbon for AIDS awareness. This year the government will devote an estimated $30 million to the program.
One of Iran's most acclaimed advances comes from its notoriously secretive network of prisons, where hundreds of drug-addicted inmates sometimes share the same makeshift syringe to inject heroin smuggled in by guards or visiting relatives. In a startling acknowledgment of sex and drugs even in its most closely guarded quarters, the Tehran administration has made condoms and needles available in detention centers across the country.
"Iran now has one of the best prison programs for HIV in not just the region, but in the world," said Dr. Hamid Setayesh, the coordinator for the U.N. AIDS office in Tehran. "They're passing out condoms and syringes in prisons. This is unbelievable. In the whole world, there aren't more than six or seven countries doing that." -- Yoshie