Notable Quotations of 2007; ADS-L issues; Coon's Posterior Sandwich (Coon-ass)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Nov 4, 2007, at 1:55 AM, Barry Popik wrote:

> NOTABLE QUOTATIONS OF 2007
> ...
> The President Bush "World War III" quote is an important one, and
> "WWIII" can also be WOTY. The Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "There are no gay
> people in my country" quote is also important.
> ...

Ahmadinejad was of course speaking in Persian.  but the clips that
i've seen of the Columbia talk have two versions of the denial in the
English translation:

In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country.

In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon.  I don't know who told you
that.

----

as for the facts, homosexual *behavior* is punishable by death in
Iran (though conviction requires four confessions from the accused or
the testimony of four witnesses, so there aren't a huge number of
convictions); but same-sex *desire* is taken to be evidence that the
person exhibiting this desire is really of the other sex (since the
theory is that there are no homosexuals in Iran), which means that
this person is required to undergo sex change -- something i learned
from a paper given to the Queer Studies workshop at Stanford recently:

Professor Afsaneh Najmabadi,  "Transing and Transpassing Across Sex-
Gender Lines in Contemporary Iran" (Najmabadi is Chair of Women's
Studies and Professor of History and Women's Studies at Harvard).

arnold

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