Loving another human being shouldn't be a crime
Because love is love is love
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran has executed two gay men who were convicted on charges of sodomy and spent six years on death row, a rights group reported. Homosexuality is illegal in Iran, considered one of the most repressive places in the world for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
According to a report on Sunday by the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the two men were identified as Mehrdad Karimpour and Farid Mohammadi.
They were sentenced to death for “forced sexual intercourse between two men” and hanged in a prison in the northwestern city of Maragheh, some 500 kilometers (310 miles) from the capital, Tehran….
Under Iranian law, sodomy, rape, adultery, armed robbery and murder are among crimes that can lead to the death penalty.
I often wonder what a country like Iran thinks they gain by executing, jailing, or otherwise persecuting those whose only crime is loving the “wrong” person. After all, who’s harmed by two non-heterosexual people loving each other? The state isn’t damaged, and any “crime,” if anyone could even describe it as such, is victimless.
It’s been argued that one doesn’t choose whom one loves; the heart wants what it wants. Sometimes those desires are expressed in ways that may fall outside what’s considered “normal.” But what is it that makes such desires “bad,” “wrong,” or “sinful?” How can love be considered anyone of those things, especially when you consider that loving someone means, among other things, taking an interest in their well-being?
What religious zealots trapped in a narrow definition of love fail to understand is that no one person gets to define what’s “right” or “proper.” There’s no “right” or “wrong” way to love someone. The problems begin when those entrapped by their narrow, hateful dogma believe they have the right to enforce their definition of love upon others.
No matter what a relationship may seem from the outside, the only people who can know what’s happening are those inside it. There are as many different rules and roles as relationships, each diverse and unique as a snowflake. For anyone to believe that they have the right and the power to enforce a one-size-fits-all set of rules shows that they have no idea what love is and what it means.
I don’t know a thing about the two Iranian men, but it saddens me that the state murdered two people for the simple act of loving one another. In an era when no one can claim there’s too much love in this world, we should be celebrating the fact that two people took it upon themselves to share their most intimate selves.
I may not know much, but I know one elementary truth: LOVE IS LOVE IS LOVE. My definition of love doesn’t have to be shared by anyone else, because how someone else loves will be based on their own experience and ability to open their heart to another person.
Loving another person, whatever that might look like, isn’t a crime. It might not be what you or I might do, but we don’t get a veto. Of course, we can control what impacts us directly, but how and whom others choose to love is, frankly, none of our damned business. And no government or religion should have the power to persecute or execute those whose love falls outside accepted “norms.”
For what IS “normal?”
We should be celebrating love, not persecuting it. Because when the heart wants what it wants, sometimes the results can be something not universally accepted. That doesn’t make it wrong; it just means that some folks need to broaden their horizons a bit.
Because LOVE IS LOVE IS LOVE. And that’s something of which this world is perpetually in short supply.
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