Strange Priorities

According to a news report, one of the peace protesters who had been taken hostage and saved is gay.

During his four months of captivity, James LoneyÂ’s sexuality was kept out of the media at the request of his family, said Doug Pritchard, co-director of the aid group Christian Peacemaker Teams.

Keep in mind that this group first started going to Iraq to try to preserve Saddam's government from US attack, then read this:

In 2001, Amnesty International reported that IraqÂ’s constitution was amended to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death. Although the constitution reverted back to the original 1969 document when Saddam HusseinÂ’s regime was toppled in 2003, the status of gay and lesbian rights remain unclear.

I am not sure if Loney was one of the peacekeepers who arrived in Iraq prior to the war. If so then he was trying to save a government that would have gladly executed him.

While the rights of gays and lesbians might be unclear under the current Iraq government, their rights under kidnappers seems well-defined - they have none and might well be killed out of hand.

I see this paradox constantly among the anti-war left. They support governments that are against human rights and claim that the US is the danger to the world. I've complained before about the self-loathing of the west. What else would make people in the west support groups who would see them dead? The same is true for the women's groups that supported the Taliban against the US. (The protests I saw conducted by Not in our Name were all-women.) Their hatred of their own culture makes them support cultures opposed to their own values.