Air France has already faced a revolt from female staff who refused to wear the hijab on flights to Iran.  Because doing so would subject them to punishment by Iran’s religious police, they also demanded the right not to fly to Iran at all.  Now Air France is facing a similar revolt from its gay stewards, for whom the penalty merely for existing can be death.

A change.org petition is calling for the French carrier to give gay cabin crew the option to refuse to fly to Tehran – the capital of Iran – a country where homosexuality is punishable by death.  So far over 5000 people have signed the petition…

“Sure, our sexuality isn’t written on our passports and it doesn’t change the way we work as a crew,” read the petition. “But it is inconceivable to force someone to go to a country where his kind are condemned for who they are.”

As the petition points out (link is in French), the penalty for homosexuality is a severe whipping even if the offender is a minor.  If an adult, death is called for by the law.  Iranian law considers itself to be entirely in line with sharia on this point.  It describes these penalties as “hadd,” a sharia law term meaning that the punishment is mandated by God. No human government, in the eyes of the clerics running the Iranian regime, can rightfully deny God by punishing homosexuality with less than death.  The only exception from punishment is if one of the parties was forced, and can prove it in court.  The only exception from the death penalty is for minors or those for whom the sex did not rise to the level of penetration.

The fear of flying to Iran even for an overnight stay displayed by these men is completely rational and appropriate.  Iran’s authorities have been engaged in a “witch hunt” for signs of Western influence in the wake of the so-called Iran Deal.  Gay men flying in on a Western nation’s airliner as a consequence of the end of the sanctions against Iran would be a paradigm case of ‘Western influence as a result of the Iran Deal.’  They are right to think that there is a substantial danger of them being made an example of by Iranian authorities.

This is not the only way in which the authorities in the Islamic Republic use sex as a weapon against their population. Rape in Iran’s prisons is not merely a factor of a loss of control by guards.  Instead, it is actively practiced by Iranian authorities as a form of torture for political prisoners and, in some cases, as a part of the punishment process.  Since sharia forbids the execution of female virgins, for example, Iranian guards will “marry” and rape virgin girls on the night before their executions.  This is said to be done in the service of God and divine justice.