The aggregator Twitchy noted that the UK government had elected to issue a travel advisory to its gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender nationals who might be traveling to certain American states.  However, there was an odd omission:

The U.K. might want to hurry and patch its travel advice for LGBT citizens headed to Bangladesh. “Local laws reflect the fact that Bangladesh is a mainly Islamic country,” reads the site, adding, “You should respect local traditions, customs, laws and religions at all times and be aware of your actions to ensure that they do not offend other cultures or religious beliefs.”

Strangely, the U.S. travel advisory makes no mention of respecting local religious customs, while the travel advice for Bangladesh has no link to LGBT  travel guidelines. It probably should, as Bangladeshi gay rights activist and Julhas Mannan and a companion were hacked to death Monday by Islamic extremists, who delivered a package full of machetes to Mannan’s apartment.

Indeed, murdered activist Mannan was a US government employee in addition to being the editor of a local gay rights magazine.  His employment with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) might have protected him from official attempts to suppress his rights advocacy.  It did not protect him from the extrajudicial enforcement of sharia law.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, and the government blamed the Islamist opposition party for incitement.  However, the opposition party cannot bear all the blame.  Bangladesh’s sitting Prime Minister recently endorsed the killing of writers who violate the tenets of Islam, especially if they should criticize the faith or its icons.  She told the press:

Everyone has to hold their tongue, has to maintain a level of decency in what the write. If they write something provocative and something bad happens, the government will not take responsibility… If someone writes filthy things about my religion, why should we tolerate it?

Bangladesh is hardly alone in this attitude.  Egypt just jailed 11 men for homosexual conduct, several for more than a decade each.  Bangladesh and Egypt are part of a wide range of countries, almost exclusively in the Islamic world, where homosexuality remains illegal.  In several of the countries, represented in dark red on the map above, the penalty is death.  Saudi Arabia now executes men for using social media in a way that seems like gay solicitation.  They, like Iran, view the execution of homosexuals as a religious duty.

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.

That’s the sort of thing the UK might want to add to its travel advisories, given how worried it is about North Carolina.