Oct 10, 2007Quickie Link: Ahmadinejad Says Comments About Gays Were Misunderstood
By vanrozenheim
(Iran) - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when asked if there were gay people in his country, Ahmadinejad said, through an interpreter: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it." Ahmadinejad's media adviser, Mohammad Kalhor, told Reuters that Ahmadinejad was simply misunderstood by Western media. "What Ahmadinejad said was not a political answer," Kalhor told Reuters. "He said that, compared to American society, we don't have many homosexuals." Kalhor told Reuters that Ahmadinejad did not intend to imply that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Rather, he said, the president wanted to say that homosexuality is not as common as it is in the West because of cultural and religious differences. Homosexuality is punishable by death in the Islamic Republic.
